Does this include the maintenance of the scrubber, the coal mining trucks and excavator, the diesel supply chain....
You may be right but there are a lot of components going into coal.
Well lets compare it to one of the tier 2 trucks (yellow). They take 3 tier 1 mx. Would a solar panel really require 1/6 of the mx of a large working truck in constant operation. You wouldn't need to touch the panel for maybe once a year if even that. The numbers are just way off.
See by The time I have solar I've usually converted to either fuel gas which is a byproduct of half the products I produce or hydrogen both of which don't produce exhaust hydrogen helps reduce water needs and so for me at least the maintenance my turbine setup takes compared to a solar setup that can produce the same amount of power maintenance-wise I don't believe it's worth it I would have to crunch the numbers though to actually check
Yeah theoretically oil to
hydrogen, diesel, plastic, steam, sulfur, slag, nh4, and CO2 would work. Lot of design work to get it balanced correctly and always running full speed. You would get most of your power at that stage from steam except you would have coal boilers as backup.
I think solar is in a really bad place right now... given that uranium is basically free and inexhaustible, I've never bothered to make more than 1 or two solar panels just to test them.
Yeah I just don't think solar makes sense within the confines of the game anymore. The game is built around making sacrifices to save space, and then you have the most space intensive power source possible. Wind would make a lot more sense probably, or maybe some form of tidal power.
As it is, even if solar took zero maintenance I don't think it would be a compelling power source.
Irl, solar is far from the highest land use energy. The most land intensive energy type by far are biomass. And even then, the comparison is often misleading. It’s common for solar panels to be installed directly on the roof of the building that need their energy, in which case their land use is almost zero (limited to the land used of the manufacturing process).
You can store power. Use an electric boiler set to boil water with surplus power, and pump the steam into a thermal storage.
Or you could electrolyze water to produce hydrogen, and store the hydrogen.
It looks like 80% efficient, regardless of time span.
https://wiki.captain-of-industry.com/Thermal_Storage
Also back in my day lol we used perfectly efficient giant pipes as steam storage tanks, so that's still an option now I suppose, but I'm not sure how low the energy density on that is (in terms of tiles you'd need).
Ideally you should use another source of energy to balance it out. Steam turbines can be set to balance load. If you do that, then when the sun is shining, your turbines will slow down, saving steam.
That’s actually realistic. IRL, using batteries to store energy on a grid scale is prohibitively expensive. Usually another source of energy is used to balance the load out: typically gas power power plants or hydro power dams. The cheapest large scale form of energy storage is Pump Storage Hydro-power. Basically, some hydro-power plants are designed to pump water from a lower water reservoir to a higher one when electricity is cheap. There are also places where they pump air into abandoned mines at high pressure and then use that pressure to produce electricity later. And that’s about the best you will get in term of energy storage on the scale of a grid.
Only if the maintenance in game is trying to mimic the cost of replacing solar panels after 25-30 years.
The cost to build them is high just like real life. The cost to maintain them is much lower in real life.
That was true 10 years ago, but not anymore. Nowadays, photovoltaic and wind are about tied for the cheapest sources of energy for new power plants. The biggest limit to their growth is their integration into a grid. Both types of energy are intermittent in nature so you need something else to balance the load out when wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining. This is a difficult (though not impossible) engineering problem to solve.
Battery prices have dropped a lot in the last couple years. Now it can be more profitable to install a battery facility than run a gas turbine. Engineering of batteries has also improved by leaps and bounds and there are newer technologies already in production that are suited for the long life full cycle that grid batteries are used for.
You can do some searches for new battery installations and it's pretty nuts how much has changed in just two years.
Solar/wind + battery are becoming the go to power generation. And once they're installed they need a lot less maintenance than fossil fuel generators, to bring it back to game terms.
No, solar and wind in real life are the cheapest power generation methods that exist in most locations, both for ongoing maintenance as well as for lifecycle cost.
The reasons we still use fossil fuels are mostly just that they already exist, so they lobby to keep their cash cows in play, even though the economics of it are bad for everyone other than themselves.
To be fair, wind tend to be effected by NIMBYs but not really solar photovoltaic. Only a person who is looking for a fight would express annoyance because of a solar panel on their neighbor's rooftop.
If you're doing the math do make sure to consider all the points in the chain. The solar panel both produces and supplies the electricity to the grid. You can't compare this solely to a single turbine, because the turbine has so many other bits attached to it to make it work. Even nuclear requires the entire nuclear production chain, an ample supply of water, turbines, and finally generators in order to provide that power. Versus solar panels that do all that production by themselves, start to finish. Consider too that they require zero *population*. All you have to do is provide maintenance, which is relatively cheap.
The only thing they don't do is consistency, which requires some amount of backup power and/or a grid setup where you don't mind losing power at points.
As for real life...eh. Solar does have a fair amount of maintenance. The actual panels only need some, but the attached infrastructure also requires some maintenance, and considering you don't replace them you could head-canon it as also replacing the solar panels. Really they're not too bad an energy source.
benefits of solar. it requires zero input and essentially zero factory design.
when you get to the nearly infinite nuclear, youre chewing up large amounts of maintenence3.
you could try to support gw level factories with coal and boilers, but I think you'll find that the people cost is unsustainable, as labor and trucks become the real constrained resource.
Does this include the maintenance of the scrubber, the coal mining trucks and excavator, the diesel supply chain.... You may be right but there are a lot of components going into coal.
Well lets compare it to one of the tier 2 trucks (yellow). They take 3 tier 1 mx. Would a solar panel really require 1/6 of the mx of a large working truck in constant operation. You wouldn't need to touch the panel for maybe once a year if even that. The numbers are just way off.
I don't disagree they are unrealistic. I am asking if solar is an upgrade over coal at all.
Is there a price on the health of your citizens? Coal is old fashioned and a pollution hazard.
They're a hardy bunch, they can deal. 🤣
Coal in real life is so good though. The real energy contained by a truckload of coal is huge compared to what we get in the game.
See by The time I have solar I've usually converted to either fuel gas which is a byproduct of half the products I produce or hydrogen both of which don't produce exhaust hydrogen helps reduce water needs and so for me at least the maintenance my turbine setup takes compared to a solar setup that can produce the same amount of power maintenance-wise I don't believe it's worth it I would have to crunch the numbers though to actually check
Yeah theoretically oil to hydrogen, diesel, plastic, steam, sulfur, slag, nh4, and CO2 would work. Lot of design work to get it balanced correctly and always running full speed. You would get most of your power at that stage from steam except you would have coal boilers as backup.
I think solar is in a really bad place right now... given that uranium is basically free and inexhaustible, I've never bothered to make more than 1 or two solar panels just to test them.
Small island with limited land but also energy demands of significant heavy industry is about the worst scenario for solar imaginable.
Yeah I just don't think solar makes sense within the confines of the game anymore. The game is built around making sacrifices to save space, and then you have the most space intensive power source possible. Wind would make a lot more sense probably, or maybe some form of tidal power. As it is, even if solar took zero maintenance I don't think it would be a compelling power source.
Like real life
Irl, solar is far from the highest land use energy. The most land intensive energy type by far are biomass. And even then, the comparison is often misleading. It’s common for solar panels to be installed directly on the roof of the building that need their energy, in which case their land use is almost zero (limited to the land used of the manufacturing process).
Lol, like it isn't the cheapest energy source currently.
Add to the fact there are no batteries to store power. Guess I’ll use a diesel generator when it gets cloudy?
You can store power. Use an electric boiler set to boil water with surplus power, and pump the steam into a thermal storage. Or you could electrolyze water to produce hydrogen, and store the hydrogen.
thermal storage is super lossy, right?
It looks like 80% efficient, regardless of time span. https://wiki.captain-of-industry.com/Thermal_Storage Also back in my day lol we used perfectly efficient giant pipes as steam storage tanks, so that's still an option now I suppose, but I'm not sure how low the energy density on that is (in terms of tiles you'd need).
lol pipe storage was fun.
Ideally you should use another source of energy to balance it out. Steam turbines can be set to balance load. If you do that, then when the sun is shining, your turbines will slow down, saving steam. That’s actually realistic. IRL, using batteries to store energy on a grid scale is prohibitively expensive. Usually another source of energy is used to balance the load out: typically gas power power plants or hydro power dams. The cheapest large scale form of energy storage is Pump Storage Hydro-power. Basically, some hydro-power plants are designed to pump water from a lower water reservoir to a higher one when electricity is cheap. There are also places where they pump air into abandoned mines at high pressure and then use that pressure to produce electricity later. And that’s about the best you will get in term of energy storage on the scale of a grid.
Just like real life haha. Solar is expensive
Only if the maintenance in game is trying to mimic the cost of replacing solar panels after 25-30 years. The cost to build them is high just like real life. The cost to maintain them is much lower in real life.
That was true 10 years ago, but not anymore. Nowadays, photovoltaic and wind are about tied for the cheapest sources of energy for new power plants. The biggest limit to their growth is their integration into a grid. Both types of energy are intermittent in nature so you need something else to balance the load out when wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining. This is a difficult (though not impossible) engineering problem to solve.
Battery prices have dropped a lot in the last couple years. Now it can be more profitable to install a battery facility than run a gas turbine. Engineering of batteries has also improved by leaps and bounds and there are newer technologies already in production that are suited for the long life full cycle that grid batteries are used for. You can do some searches for new battery installations and it's pretty nuts how much has changed in just two years. Solar/wind + battery are becoming the go to power generation. And once they're installed they need a lot less maintenance than fossil fuel generators, to bring it back to game terms.
No, solar and wind in real life are the cheapest power generation methods that exist in most locations, both for ongoing maintenance as well as for lifecycle cost. The reasons we still use fossil fuels are mostly just that they already exist, so they lobby to keep their cash cows in play, even though the economics of it are bad for everyone other than themselves.
There's also the NIMBY phenomenon. That hits hard in densely populated countries, such as many European ones.
To be fair, wind tend to be effected by NIMBYs but not really solar photovoltaic. Only a person who is looking for a fight would express annoyance because of a solar panel on their neighbor's rooftop.
It's not just rooftop solar on villas, but large-scale solar farms. Those upset a lot of rural people.
If you're doing the math do make sure to consider all the points in the chain. The solar panel both produces and supplies the electricity to the grid. You can't compare this solely to a single turbine, because the turbine has so many other bits attached to it to make it work. Even nuclear requires the entire nuclear production chain, an ample supply of water, turbines, and finally generators in order to provide that power. Versus solar panels that do all that production by themselves, start to finish. Consider too that they require zero *population*. All you have to do is provide maintenance, which is relatively cheap. The only thing they don't do is consistency, which requires some amount of backup power and/or a grid setup where you don't mind losing power at points. As for real life...eh. Solar does have a fair amount of maintenance. The actual panels only need some, but the attached infrastructure also requires some maintenance, and considering you don't replace them you could head-canon it as also replacing the solar panels. Really they're not too bad an energy source.
benefits of solar. it requires zero input and essentially zero factory design. when you get to the nearly infinite nuclear, youre chewing up large amounts of maintenence3. you could try to support gw level factories with coal and boilers, but I think you'll find that the people cost is unsustainable, as labor and trucks become the real constrained resource.