Geothermal won't provide electricity for me but only for export

[Witch Moon/Canondah]

I set up a small village away from my main city and there wanted to use a geothermal power plant since a water source was conveniently available. But even though the low voltage connection to the road is already established, it would only ouput like 20ish MW over that. The majority is just exported to a neighbouring city. Even if I add a transformer station and connect it to either high voltage connection, absolutely nothing will be directed to that transformer station. I tried cutting the export line to my neighbour, but nothing changes other than the export drops to zero, none of the other lines gain any voltage. Anyone else having similar problems? I know it's not a bottleneck because the problem is not that a line can't handle a certain throughput, it's just that my geo plant refuses to provide me with electricity even if I cut the outside connection (where it would otherwise deliver the electricity to).

[MontyDub]

Also the Incineration plant says its putting out 100% when its not putting out anything at all. When they fixed the Garbage bug it messed with the power output.
I also have a Geothermal plant in my city, I just noticed same issue you stated above.

Went back to using Wind turbines.......

[Witch Moon/Canondah]

I don't think I experience the same problem you described because my incineration plant and geothermal power plant for my main city work perfectly fine:
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198142668553/screenshot/2222024242888315901/
The plant in the village itself works perfectly fine too, the output is good only the direction it sends it out to is not:
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198142668553/screenshot/2222024242888327409/
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198142668553/screenshot/2222024242888342531/
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198142668553/screenshot/2222024242888344218/
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198142668553/screenshot/2222024242888345682/
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198142668553/screenshot/2222024242888347347/
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198142668553/screenshot/2222024242888351788/

[TW_Strange]

You probably just didn't have enough demand.
extra wattage becomes low utilization unless you connect your grid to the border.
When you have a connection, all excess power will be automatically exported.

A road has a capacity of 40 MW. So when you plop a transformer down, there is 40MW going both ways. you need to connect both directions of the road to your city to utilize all 80 MW.

As long as you're not seeing any buildings without power, your grid is working fine and you don't have to tune things.

[archonsod]

Originally posted by Witch Moon/Canondah:

I set up a small village away from my main city and there wanted to use a geothermal power plant since a water source was conveniently available. But even though the low voltage connection to the road is already established, it would only ouput like 20ish MW over that. The majority is just exported to a neighbouring city.

Is demand being fulfilled by another source? You're only going to get the geothermal putting power into the grid if it's needed. If not, it's going to export it.

[jshutich]

I don't have any problems with local power from the geo plant and export excess. First have your geo plant connect to your city roads. Watch out for highways that don't have electricity in the road. You can put lights on the highway to fix this or run the little local power line cable. Sometime your geo plant is out of town so the power transfers to the road next to the geo plant but that road then get connected to a highway so your geo plant is not actually connected to your town because the highway does not have power lines like regular roads do. Another way is to use a transformer and high voltage lines to connect the geo plant to your towns road system.

Second connect the geo power directly to the big high voltage line coming from outside to export the excess power.

Transformers have an 80 MW capacity limit so if you are exporting power thru a transformer, you can only export 80 MW. This is why you want to connect the geo plant to the outside high voltage line.

[Witch Moon/Canondah]

Nice tries but no, there is demand, as you can see with the railway station complaining about insufficient electricity. Plus it is in its own network, the main city is completely disconnected from this village. The geo plant is the single source of power for this entity so it should (because it's its damn job) provide everyone with electricity before shipping the rest outside for export.

And I know there is a limit of 80 MW on powerlines and 40 MW on roads, but both are far from being met. The connection for export is done via high voltage lines and works, my problem is the "inhouse" connection. As soon as i disconnect the outside connection, my plant refuses to even send out any electricity to the transformer. Even more baffling is the fact that in my main city I have pretty much the same setup: geo plant on the road and directly connected to the road, connected to a transformer via high voltage lines AND connected to neighbouring city for export, all working. Same setup in this village, not working.

[banzaimonkey]

It does seem odd. A few thoughts:

1. Does mousing over the "no power" icon give you any clues? For instance, does electrified rail require the other end of the track to have power, too?
2. Have you had the simulation paused the entire time? I notice the complaint icons can stick around for a bit until the simulation has time to run.
3. I've noticed elevation sometimes causes problems with road connections. You can try the "move" button on the building to reposition it and see it that helps.
4. Could be a bug. One of my buildings says "no pedestrian access" even though it's connected to a road and surrounded by paths. I'm not sure it stops the building from working, though.

[Witch Moon/Canondah]

Yeah I have a special industry which complains about no road access. The funny thing there is that the main building doesn't complain but all the unclickable extra buildings on the area complain :D .

As to the geo plant: No further improvements were gained. I tried moving it a bit, I tried surrounding it with roads completely (because sometimes buildings want every road access they have connected to roads, not just the main entrance), I tried relocating the transformer station to a different road, and finally I tried connecting the lines from the main city to my village whereupon no electricity from there was sent to the village either. If it is a bug, then it might not have anything to do with the plant but with the endeavour of having a seperate settlement instead of one big pile on the map.

[rochetjeremy]

Working fine for me, check your electricty connexion

[Kray]

i think you need this transformator thing to convert down the high power electricity. idk. but i think, the power what is produced by the powerplants, are divided to low and high power. And if you want to use also the highpower, then you need enought tranformators. Each one can convert 80 MW.

[Witch Moon/Canondah]

I have a low voltage connection to the street and high voltage to the transformer, as you can see in the screenshots I posted. There you can also see that the connection isn't the problem, it is connected but doesn't even provide the max. of 40 MW a street connection can handle to the street but only 23ish which is apparently not enough for the buildings plus train station.

[Walker Evans]

Think I may have experienced something similar today. Power from my hydroelectric plant just stopped going into my main city at some point. Only noticed when I saw that I was importing power and my battery was completely drained. Turned out, power just stopped transmitting over a high-voltage junction for some reason. Demolished that stretch and rewired it, and it all worked again.

[Witch Moon/Canondah]

My theory now is that there has to be a bug either with providing electricity to more than one (passenger) train station or the second one just has a constant display bug complaining about it when in reality it receives enough. I started a second map and there encountered the exact same problem (granted I used geothermal again, but I doubt it is the cause of the problem): In a completely seperated district I even built an entire plant just for that one and connected it only to a transformer station there. Nothing but this district is in the network. The weird thing is, no matter how much the district grew, no other building complained about lack of electricity, the line even provided more and more as the consumption grew. With the train station being the one and only exception from the moment I built it up to the point now where everything around it is fully built by now.
Train station complaining
So again, this leads me to the conclusion that there either is a bug with ONLY THE SECOND TRAIN STATION on the map getting no electricity, or it is just a display bug, which I find more likely since everything in the train station seems to be working. The trains come and go, the subways come and go, the people flood in and out, the parking lots are being used. Maybe I should just ignore it and hope for paradox to fix the potential bug soon.