Green power

[TheEvilMango]

I am doing a challenge where I only use green energy sources, manual gens, solar panels and steam turbines. I've been doing some testing and coming up with good step ups for volcanos and geyers that should help me get electricity. Also ik u can set up the metal refinery to be power positive. Any advice u can give me to help out? Also is it possible to go from steam rocket straight to hydrogen?

[Radam]

If you have a dupe with high tinkering and making steel it might be power positive.

 

As for rockets, when you repeatedly send research module to the same asteroid you get 10 points instead of 50.  So you can build steam rocket with like 9 modules and just keep sending it untill you research everything.

 

For liquid hydrogen without supercoolant you can only use the 1kg packet trick/exploit or whatevr. Seems its gonna stay ingame. Using 1kg water packets in aquatuner can cool it down to 0K, altho it uses really alot of power.

[Eternal Firesea]

Don't underestimate the power of the solid fuel thruster (unless you consider spraying rust everywhere to not be green).
You'll probably want to make use of the Power Control Station in your power plants, though giving an engineer's tuneup to a manual generator is just such a silly image.

You don't consider hydrogen or natural gas to be green?

[PhailRaptor]

5 minutes ago, Eternal Firesea said:

You don't consider hydrogen or natural gas to be green?

I can't speak to Hydrogen, but NatGas is absolutely a fossil fuel.  And as such, it is not green.

[Radam]

Ethanol?

 

Feeding sage hatches polluted dirt from distilleries and using resoulting coal in coal generator?

 

Capturing gas from flatulent dupes and oil refineries? 

 

Not using gas range at all?

Plastics?

[Nebbie]

8 hours ago, Radam said:

Ethanol?

 

Feeding sage hatches polluted dirt from distilleries and using resoulting coal in coal generator?

 

Capturing gas from flatulent dupes and oil refineries? 

 

Not using gas range at all?

Plastics?

The first three all violate the associated achievement. Notably, said achievement allows for hydrogen power.

So, let's go over each power source:

• Manual generators obviously scale pretty well, but will be very annoying to keep on top of as each one doesn't provide much, and dupes run off to do other things.
• Hydrogen generators are pretty nice because a SPOM is power-positive and generally one of the good ways to generate oxygen. It also actually deletes tons of heat, although you'll need an aquatuner to really take advantage of this properly to get cool oxygen (dump the heat into the input water and hydrogen to be deleted), which may push it below power-neutral.
• Solar panels of course are a lot more powerful and don't need water, but in practice, the associated batteries and robo-miners and doors take up a ton of energy, so you need to scale them up like crazy. You need 9 smart batteries per to minimize the potential power reduction from poorly-timed meteors.
• Steam turbines are great once you've got a crazy heat source. Said crazy heat sources include steam vents, volcanoes, and meteors. Trouble is, they're a real pain to set up and the metal refinery is pretty hard to get power-positive with them prior to space materials.

Here's the ideal progression I think:

1. Get a non-forest-start (trees are only useful for power and ethanol, but you won't need much ethanol) map with the Volcanoes modifier. Oceania would probably be best, although Rime might work well if it actually doesn't further limit expansion than the power issues do.
2. Start with manual generators (and overlapping shifts so dupes are always on them) and beeline for SPOMs.
3. Once you've got that sorted, dig to an oil biome and get drecko ranching started, aiming for glossies. You should find lead freely in the oil biome, getting you the refined metal for a steam turbine.
4. Find your closest volcano (not a metal volcano, unless it's specifically iron, as copper and gold simply don't carry much heat and thus don't run turbines well), a source of ethanol (pools in rust biome, or get an acorn from a care package and build an ethanol distiller), and the materials for steel (oil biome has fossil, you've got coal to start with, so really just a matter of iron and setting up a metal refinery and rock crusher).
5. Build a steam chamber above it, with 3 rows of steel mechanized airlocks to control heat flow (middle row of mechanized airlocks open = vacuum to prevent heat transfer). In the actual volcano area, you want just a pool of ethanol below vacuum. Set up automation so the middle row of mechanized airlocks close when the steam room temperature drops too low, and open if it goes too high; aim for 200 C, and try to not make the doors jitter a lot (filter gates or use two rather different temperatures for open vs. close, but don't go above 200 C).
6. If it's an iron volcano, you'll want to do this way differently, letting the molten iron sit on a little metal tile with a tempshift plate above to help it cool when liquid, and conduct heat to the side to the steam chamber using again mechanized airlocks, but just standing up 3 in a row. allow a diagonal of vacuum for collection by either dupes or a sweeper arm, and you can get the cooled-down iron. Obviously, a sweeper arm is highly preferable to dupes for this, because you can hook it up to the steam room's automation to only sweep the iron when it's matched the steam temperature.
7. Once steam turbines on volcanos are powering your base, head to space for solar to be able to scale up power faster.

Cooling down the turbines may be a bit of an issue. I've heard that up to 139 C steam lets you self-cool by running the steam turbine's 95 C output over it in radiant pipes, and above that, you may need active cooling. I suspect that this can be raised via ethanol over the turbine (very thermally conductive, and lower SHC than hydrogen, same reason to use it in the volcano chamber) to help the rate of cooling. I'm not sure if it'd be a good idea to make the turbine itself out of aluminum to raise its thermal conductivity, as from what I've heard, you want low thermal conductivity because that's used for the heat it gains to itself from using hot steam; you probably still want lead, which will somewhat fight the ethanol and radiant pipes.

[Radam]

So, this achievment? 

 

Super Sustainable

Generate 240,000kJ of power without using coal, methane, petrol or wood generators.

[Yoake]

If you want to easy-mode this type of challenge just make a shinebug reactor.

Something like this from Brothgar. 

 

[TheEvilMango]

I was on the fence about hydrogen being green but since it isn't a fossil fuel and doesn't have by products I'll count it as green. Thank u for all the ideas so far.

Also how do tame the valcanoes spawned by the valanoes trait? The r flooded with magma.

[Nebbie]

6 hours ago, TheEvilMango said:

I was on the fence about hydrogen being green but since it isn't a fossil fuel and doesn't have by products I'll count it as green. Thank u for all the ideas so far.

Also how do tame the valcanoes spawned by the valanoes trait? The r flooded with magma.

That is a bit of a problem. Just dig out an area below and then let the magma loose into it once the volcano enters a dormant period. Volcanoes are dormant for long periods of time, so you'll have plenty of time to set up the volcano room (and really you just need to vacuum it out and then put in a bit of ethanol, which doesn't take long). As to do what to do with the magma once it's stored, you can't really pump the stuff out, but you could build the usual mechanized airlock trick to test the system on this magma, and maybe also use it for the first several dormancy periods. It'll eventually cool, at which point you could have dupes remove the mechanized airlocks to properly seal the volcano room for the long haul.

If you need help on what the setup should look like, Brothgar did a video on it. Again, cooling the steam turbine may be a serious issue (you can't just put wheezeworts in there because they need phosphorite now). I recommend testing out in debug mode first whether ethanol atmosphere and gold radiant pipes carrying the water out will do it with a lead turbine at 200 C steam, and then if the turbine overheats, slowly reduce until you find the maximum operating temperature with the steam; I think you'll be able to get over 139 C (again, ethanol didn't used to be an option), but I don't think it'll get to 200 C, so the turbine will be somewhat limited, and you might need more than one to deal with things with self-cooling turbines. Also, metal tiles of steel probably beat diamond tiles; save your diamond for tempshift plates, as you'll want to completely cover the background of the volcano in them.

You should also try and test salt instead of phosphorus; as a gas it has higher thermal conductivity, but the boiling point is a lot higher. I suspect it may help alleviate the issues Brothgar had in his actual base setup with initial startup potentially having magma buildup, at the cost of losing some power.

[Trego]

11 hours ago, PhailRaptor said:

I can't speak to Hydrogen, but NatGas is absolutely a fossil fuel.  And as such, it is not green.

Natural gas is natural, therefore it's green.  Natural Gas which comes from cow farts is absolutely not a fossil fuel, and as such it is green.  Also, burning fossil fuel promotes plant growth,and plants are green, therefore fossil fuels are green.  I don't know why we care so much about colors when it comes to energy generation in a game, but gassy moo farts come from chlorine originally, and nothing in ONI is greener than chlorine.  I'm making a new world where I only use green energy sources, focusing on power production from boiling green polluted water into steam for steam turbines, and natural gas generators, which not only come from green-derived natural gas, but output green polluted water as waste.  Petroleum and ethanol generators do output a lot of green polluted water as waste, so they're pretty green, but not as green as natural gas generators.

 

[avc15]

9 hours ago, Nebbie said:

Cooling down the turbines may be a bit of an issue.

If you're running a steam turbine on 250C steam and only unblock 2 ports, and you're running an A/T loop to cool the turbine with water or pwater, and you regulate room temperature with a temp sensor, cooling averages less than 200W. I don't know what the exact figure is but I'm not much into debug benchmarking experiments. It'd be about half with super coolant, and it wouldn't take a lot of super coolant (I suspect 100kg would be plenty)

Cooling gets a great deal more expensive at higher steam temperatures and higher flow rates.

[PhailRaptor]

10 hours ago, Trego said:

I don't know why we care so much about colors when it comes to energy generation in a game

We don't care about it in-game, beyond the mechanics of the achievement it is named for.  We do care about it in real life, but that's unrelated beyond the name of the achievement.

10 hours ago, Trego said:

Natural gas is natural, therefore it's green.  Natural Gas which comes from cow farts is absolutely not a fossil fuel, and as such it is green.  Also, burning fossil fuel promotes plant growth,and plants are green, therefore fossil fuels are green

..........what?

[Trego]

4 hours ago, PhailRaptor said:

.........what?

My post was meant to be funny, however that wasn't meant to make it confusing.  let me restate the issue more concretely:

What does green mean, on the asteroid?  

1. Natural Gas isn't necessarily a fossil fuel, on the asteroid.  Gassy moos create natural gas, so do flatulent dupes, as does feeding slicksters co2 and then cracking the resultant crude into sour gas with heat and then producing natural gas from that.  Saying that natural gas, on the asteroid, is absolutely a fossil fuel, is just not correct.  You can absolutely make and use significant quantities from currently living creatures.

2. That aside, why isn't burning fossil fuels on the asteroid 'green'?  On Earth, burning fossil fuels isn't green mainly because of global warming from co2 in the atmosphere. The asteroid doesn't have an atmosphere.

3.  There's also the issue of sustainability, but on the asteroid, fossil fuels are magically sustainable, all of them are.

4. While we're on the subject of their magic sustainability--if they're created by magic and not from time and pressure and heat operating on organic matter underground, perhaps they're not fossil fuels at all, on the asteroid?

5. It's important to remember that 'green', even on earth, isn't a factual statement, but a morally evaluative judgement.  Looking at a bowl and saying "the ice cream in this bowl is frozen, therefore it must be near or below 0 celsius" is an observation of fact followed by a logical deduction to make another factual statement about temperature. Looking at a bowl and saying "The ice cream in this bowl is vanilla, therefore it is the most tasty flavor" is an inference based on color, followed by an opinion based evaluative judgment.  Talking about what is 'green' on the asteroid is kinda like arguing about which flavor of ice cream Mi Ma prefers--I know she prefers Chocolate Raspberry Truffle, but how do I convince you of that?  Unless of course we're talking about the green of Chlorine.  The green chlorine which many players use to kill their dupes when their time to die approaches.  Now that's Deep Ecology, boys and girls.  (Deep Ecology is a school of environmentalism which holds that the only true green approach, on Earth, is to deprioritize human experience over that of other organisms and structures; one of the obvious resultant beliefs held by Deepers is that the population of human beings on Earth should be drastically reduced.  It's very real and has been around for decades at least)

6.  Perhaps the only truly green way to play ONI is to kill your colony asap.  As the quote from War Games goes "the only way to win, is not to play at all"  Finally, an explanation as to why these dang dupes are so eager to kill themselves.