Suggestion: Adjustable power intake for certain consumers

[varkarrus]

Certain power consumers seem to take in a fairly large amount of power, but over a very short period of time. A sort of "power consumed per operation" type dealio. The problem is, with the amount of energy consumption you can safely have on a power network, it can be annoying having to play within those limits just to avoid the off chance everything consumes power at once.

 

So, it'd be neat if certain things, like mechanized airlocks, auto-sweepers, and transit tube stations had small internal batteries, and you can freely control how quickly they recharge. If you imagine that a certain mechanized airlock won't be used more than once per 12 seconds on average, cap the power intake at 10kw/s and just let it slowly recharge over time.

 

This could also work with pumps, even though in their case they drain power at a constant rate. A pump at half power consumption would just draw in fluids / gas at half the normal rate, which depending on the case, may just be enough.

[Sasza22]

Well the fun thing about this game is that you can do this manually. Just set up a smart battery and use automation to disable the circuit charging it when it`s full and enable when it gets low. Connect the battery to your door system and whatever causes the power spikes and enjoy.

Also usable with a transformer and the metal refinery to avoid too much power usage. I managed to get a base running once on only 2 coal gens with a metal refinery running along normal base stuff and no power outages. The refinery was just disabled until the batteries had enough charge.