Low on coal but got excess power

[Oni Noob]

Hi,

Need your advice. I got so much unused power(electricity) in my base but I am running out of coal to create ceramic. Can you give advice whats the best way to produce coal if you got so much power? 

[Yoma_Nosme]

Use Smart battery if not already. Feed hatches....using energy to create coal to make energy and or carbin is redundant and can hardly be power positive ... coal is only produced by hatches...

[nivodeus]

Like it said before, hatches, either normal or stone hatch, depends on what materials you have most and not used most. Hatch can eat variant of food, while stone can eat most of raw mineral. I fed mine with sedimentary rock. I am at cycle 500 and I still have tons of those two. (I was out of sandstone (due to my lack of digging and my initial base biome all made of sandstone) for the normal one but they can eat sedimentary as well. 

Extra eggs and meat for food as well. If you have one dupe with good ranching skill, they should be able to handle two full ranches of hatch or even more maybe. 

[KittenIsAGeek]

A coal generator will always run until it is out of coal, unless it is connected to a smart battery that can disable it when the charge is full.  I always research up to allow automation and smart batteries before I build a coal generator.

An alternative method is to build a bunch of large batteries such that by the time your coal generator runs out of coal, they will be nearly fully charged.  Then set the coal to be delivered only when the batteries are down to 20% or so.