Power of the Seas

[KittenIsAGeek]

With the new Aqua Planet Pack there's a new source of renewable power: Tidal Turbines.  I was fortunate to get the right materials to build three of them early in the game -- like, by turn ten.  

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Except they're intermittent and don't care about your actual power needs.  I mean, sure, you can hook 'em up to a smart battery and only turn them on when power is low, but what if that also coincides with the inflow of the tidal spring?  Turn on the turbine to charge the battery but no power comes out.. 

Generally in my base power use is quite intermittent and not a continual draw, so I was seeing huge amounts of "over production" in my cycle report while also having many periods of "out of power" when trying to get things done.  So I added more batteries.  Then I had the thought, "Huh, what if I set it up like a switched mode supply I usually use later in the game."  

The battery bank:

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On the left, we have power coming in from 3 tidal turbines.  Maximum power is 900 watts, and rarely it drops to 0 when all three turbines are idle at the same time.  On the right we have a smart battery controlling a large transformer that is connected to some other generators (more about that later) that only turns on if the tidal turbines can't keep up with demand.  I could probably put a couple more large batteries in, but this works for now.

The output:

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Because of how batteries work, I can push 8kw down a regular wire to deliver power easily to anywhere.  I'll probably put a deoderizer on the output line to get rid of the 'disconnected' flag, but.. meh. Whatever.

The switch:

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This is a 6x2 "top down" block shamelessly borrowed from the "ONI Battery Switcher Cheat Sheet" produced on this forum a long time ago by "PhatJap."  The 8kw line is along the top, and the power out to my local circuit is on the bottom.  The battery on the left is set to 95/10 and the one on the right set at 80/30.

 

With 4 large batteries and one smart battery, without any power coming in the bank can recharge a switched battery 9 times.  With 8kW from the main back, the switched batteries recharge in about 3 seconds. 

Alright, so I'm catching power from the tidal turbines when they run and then using it later and can even run high-burst loads if necessary.  Sweet.  Now what happens if I'm using more power than gets provided by the tidal turbines over time?

External Power System:

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On the lower left with the battery bank is a smart battery and large transformer.  The smart battery is set to 20/0, which means that when the smart battery is out of power, the large transformer kicks on and pulls power from the two (currently) hydrogen generators.  There's room here for four, and the vent produces enough hydrogen to run one continually which means there's TONS of hydrogen to burn.  Initially, the fan near the vent was powered by the tidal turbine, but now a small transformer connected to the hydrogen generators runs that system.  Right now I could run my entire base purely on hydrogen and not have a problem, but this is a system showcasing tidal power, not hydrogen!

Anyway, if the battery bank gets too low, the hydrogen generators kick in to put a little bit of power back in the system instead of recharging the whole bank.  My power demands aren't yet up to the load necessary, so I disconnected the tidal turbines for 3 cycles just to make sure my back up system worked as intended.  It did.  Yay!

My tidal turbines are still over-producing by 380kw per cycle.  There are a couple more tidal springs near my base that could be added to the system later, but for now I'm able to run things in my base without losing power, and my tidal turbines are (mostly) delivering power that will be used instead of wasted.  

If you like my idea, or think it sucks, or have ideas for better ways to handle the tidal turbines, please feel free to comment.

Also, credit where its due: Here's the cheat sheet created by "PhatJap" quite a while back that was once posted elsewhere on this forum. 

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I've been using this method since early access, but his cheat-sheet explains the setup much more clearly than my earlier methods did.

[BLACKBERREST3]

You just gave me an idea for power storage. What if you just dump all that excess energy into heating up something like steam or now that the tepedizer does not have a cap, you can dump excess energy into that to have a limitless battery of sorts so you can extract heat later with a turbine.

hot sand battery in-game XD

3 hours ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

Also, credit where its due: Here's the cheat sheet created by "PhatJap" quite a while back that was once posted elsewhere on this forum. 

I made a guide a while ago, I remember seeing this build a few places. I remember there was a reason I didn't like it. It either had the wrong tick delay or it just didn't have the right logic or i/o I was after. When a battery switcher has the wrong tick delay it can lead to bleed back or brownouts on the system. Always make sure that switching happens on the same tick to avoid this issue.

[KittenIsAGeek]

37 minutes ago, BLACKBERREST3 said:

What if you just dump all that excess energy into heating up something like steam

I did something similar to that quite a while back to "tame" a volcano.   I built an insulated room around the volcano with a lower location to collect the magma and put quite a bit of water in -- a bit short of the amount necessary to 'overpressure' the volcano once it became steam.  Above that I put another steam chamber that powered a turbine and I separated them with a vacuum door.  In the turbine's steam chamber, a thermo sensor would open and close the door to transfer heat from the volcano to the turbine to keep the turbine at optimum temperature.  I had some iridium from a meteor shower that I built a robo miner with to grind up any magma that solidified as a tile.  The steam transferred heat well enough and didn't care if it was a couple thousand degrees.  The miner was close to the heat transfer door so it stayed mostly cool enough.

50 minutes ago, BLACKBERREST3 said:

When a battery switcher has the wrong tick delay it can lead to bleed back or brownouts on the system. Always make sure that switching happens on the same tick to avoid this issue.

Yeah, this particular setup should have the right tick delay.  I've never run into any issues with it.  Only one battery should switch at a time, and the switches for each battery have the same delay.  The only edge case I can see is if the 400J/cycle power loss happens to tick across the low battery threshold right at the exact moment the other battery trips from being used, which would cause a temporary black out as both batteries would be simultaneously disconnected from the consumers.  The left battery would flip switches a hair faster than the right, but that would disconnect it rather than put a pathway from the 8kw line to the consumers.  

Another method that I use when I don't care about power loss looks like this:

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A small transformer limits the max continuous load to 1kw as that's as fast as the battery will charge, but you can use conductive wire or heavi-watt wire on the consumer side if you have burst draws and don't want to melt wires.  It uses less refined metals and is currently powering my radbolt generators for research. 

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Huh, I just noticed my radbolt generators are only using 315 and 345 watts, respectively.  Do they now draw power based on how much radiation they get?  I don't need alternate power for the sweeper now?  Huh... Well, learn something new every day I guess.

 

1 hour ago, BLACKBERREST3 said:

now that the tepedizer does not have a cap

Wait, what now? I can burn 960 watts to ... oh, wait. Still needs to be in liquid.   Hmmmmmm.  You know, years ago I built a water distiller using aquatuners as the heat source and my only problem was just how much energy was necessary to boil polluted water.  The tepedizer would be SO much more efficient.

[BLACKBERREST3]

7 hours ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

Wait, what now?

TBF, I don't remember where I read that from. I think somebody mentioned what all that changed in the dlc/updates and that tepedizers don't have a cap anymore and now instantly drip boil liquids like a coffee maker which I thought was a cool addition. I haven't seen anyone use this feature yet so it must be that new.

7 hours ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

my only problem was just how much energy was necessary to boil polluted water

I mentioned this a couple of times, but the game feels...snappier and more conductive overall from when I last played 7 years ago. I bet you could build a pretty efficient boiler/condenser. I was thinking of making a giant one late game as a water/o2 cleaning plant.

OH! my b I forgot you were the one I was talking to before about power systems. You already knew all about that XD

Found the link I was talking about. It was a condensed list that made it a little easier to see major changes. I'll still need to read the full patch notes though.

Edited Tuesday at 11:56 AM by BLACKBERREST3