Poor Ethanol Power Generation

[TimHH]

At first I really liked the idea of planting tons of arbor trees and generate ethanol for power generation.

However, the more I play this game and the more calculation I made about the ethanol power generation, I found this way of generating power is so less efficient considering this system consumes tons of p-water and produces tons of CO2 and heat. And if you want to use auto sweepers to save your dupe's time, your petroleum geenrator could not even afford that much of power consuption, making the whole process pointless. (Yeah you could tune up the generator yet this waster your dupe's time.)

I understand that ethanol power generation is not for late game power generation, yet this way of genetraing power is also less efficient than coal generator considering that ranching 2 rooms of hatches could give you sustainable coal to burn in 2 coal generator and this way costs almost nothing but some sand and dirt...

Dealing with that tons of CO2 could also be a serious problem because you have to use air pumps or carbon dioxide absorber to keep your power house nice and clean...

At last, here is a brief calculation, 4 ethanol distilling mahcine + 2 air pumps (you might also want filtering the air because if you use high pressure ventilation than you really want to make sure you do not have 2 types of air pumped into one room), and this is already 1440 watts of constent power consuption... you could not even beat a simple and dumb coal generator. And if you also use auto sweeper, than there is at least 200-300 watts of power consuption to keep the system working. Why don't you just burn those woods?