Negative Power with positive net?

[lupacxexi]

Can anyone reproduce / verify? I have a situation where on coal power my reports say i have a positive 50-60kJ but my batteries are draining and my lights flicker off with low power even though my batteries have charge.

[Zarquan]

Remember that when your devices are off due to lack of power, they are not consuming electricity.  The report is over the whole day, so if your batteries end up full at the end of the day and you overproduce power after that (meaning your coal generators make power that doesn't go anywhere), you will see that you created more power than you consumed.

It is like this:  Your batteries start the day full.  As the day progresses, the dupes drain out all the power, then go to sleep.  At this point, the net power lost is the capacity of the batteries.  Around 2/3 through the night, the coal generators finish filling up the batteries.  You now have as much power stored as you did in the morning, so the report would say net gain in power is 0 (approximately).  Then, all the extra power that gets generated is read as a surplus, as you generated it and did not use it.

I feel this would happen if you do not have enough batteries.  More batteries mean that the generators would not be able to catch up during the night.  You probably want more power generation too.

I would like to be sure that this is actually the cause.  Could you post a screenshot of the report?  And maybe a screenshot of the colony too?