Mom, I build; tips for oilman and electrician

[degr]

I always face situation when colony start to use more than 50kw of power, and heavy-watt conductive wires can't hold load anymore. 
So, most obvious solution is use smart battery and power transformer together:
 

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Such simple trick allow to hold load much more then 50kw. Absolutely same will works for "heavy-watt wires (20kw)".

Next, most obvious solution is make 2 or more separate networks.

General advice for wire management - build them parallel as possible. Try to avoid "spider web". Same works for liquid and air pipes, automation wires and conveyor rails.

But afterwards, I start to search for self-sustained solutions, like SPOM. And here solutions I build so far:

 

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It is quite overautomated, but everything is pretty simple - gas pump works if pressure more then 350g, liquid pumps work if liquid more then 20-30kg, with buffer 5-10 sec. I'm still not sure, is it self sufficient or not, keeping eye on it, but for that case gas pressure is 300kg per tile, so, even it is not self-sustained, it will take thousands of cycles to deplete all gas.

Next topic is "make petroleum like a boss". I'm using volcano powered petroleum boilers, if you have no volcano, you may use magma on the bottom of the map, or cry like a baby, because next solution for you only partially:
 

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First, you need small door for magma. Automation is - pressure plate send green signal if pressure more than 20kg, timer sensor - 4 green, 25 red. With such configuration only small portions of magma comes in, which immediately solidify into igneous rocks. You may improve it with "hydro sensor", put it straight over pressure plate. It protect you from situation when magma does not solidify. Have no idea how it may happen, but it happens once for me (but in different boiler).

Second you need conveyor rail loop:

Igneous rocks stay in loop until their temperature fall down lower than 560C. After, they are going to second loop, which sits inside of petroleum reservoir, and stay there till 415C:

After it, you may setup 3rd and 4th loops with steam turbines:

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3rd is energy positive, because it chill rocks from 416C to 150C, and 4th energy negative, for my case it chill rocks to 25C. Still not sure it was good idea or not, because mainly I'm using ceramics, but, at least, I have thousands tons of 25C igneous rocks.

Let's forgot about rocks, we are talking about energy:
Next step to make boiler self-sustained, or even energy positive is chill petroleum:
 

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85C crude oil used as coolant, who chill autosweepers and steam turbines. Hot petroleum (170C) going through steam chamber, making boiler self sufficient. As I told above, you may use igneous rocks as alternative, or additional energy source.

 

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What I want to add, is best place for electro station location is "space". Because, you need to get rid from CO2, and you can just dump it into space, using it as "chilling" agent for your power generators. And yes, if you have magma petroleum boilers, it should work 100% uptime, because it is water positive process - more petroleum you are using, more water you are gaining. In same time carbone dioxide could be used for slickster farm, but personally I don't like slicksters. 

Also, I tried to use hot petroleum to heat polluted water into steam, but I fail because of mass deleteion bug.

[oxymoron86]

I feel a bit cheaty to use smart battery to remove 50kw cap, so I separate the power grid into smaller section. >50kw grid means you use one gigantic grid and hook up all power gen to it right? Instead I have separate grids, for example, household grid, industry grid, research grid. They all can have power gens, smart bat and transformers but wont exceed 50kw. I do need to manage the energy sources (petrol, ethanol, hydrogen, coal, lumber, etc) to distribute them to all grid power gen though. Infrastructure setup cost is high but I can expand afterwards without worries as long as I have asteroid room.