[kennysmoothx]

This is literally like Factorio.

If your Factory uses too much power, theres not enough energy to run the power plants generation, which decreases your power production. Death spiraling until theres no power.

You have to disconnect the factory, and independently power your power plants back up until you have enough energy production to connect your factory up again.

[shagie]

Capacitor circuit network warning for alarm for "main grid is drawing on this bank - bad things may happen if capacity is not increased."

Another "trick" is those burner inserters are black start capable. They can pick up fuel and feed themselves to keep running without an electrical network.

I also tend to put Schmitt triggers in low priority areas. They've got a battery on the main grid next to them and if the battery drops below 50% power they remain off until it goes back above 75% power.

[tux3]

Can't wait for a Factorio mod that simulates the grid frequency and damages equipment when it drifts too far!

[shagie]

https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/k16oom/better_pow... discusses the idea a bit.

[LorenPechtel]

That's a mod, not stock. It does two things: feeds the inserter from either end (something I think should be stock--it's a machine that grabs things, why can't it grab fuel it can reach??) and provides a trickle of power to unpowered ones (nice from a standpoint of not having to fuel them when you put them down, but it also adds blackstart capability.

As for 50%/75% triggers--the game doesn't model start/stop problems, only fancy circuit setups would give a hoot about being fed by flickering power. (But as a human....I was out adding to a big accumulator bank at twilight. Far away the bugs had a base close enough to my laser turrets that they kept attacking. The sun was powering my base but didn't have enough for the turrets. The whole bank would flicker for every bug. Usually the electrical indicator on the accumulators is a good thing.)

[shagie]

Burner inserters are stock. https://wiki.factorio.com/Burner_inserter

> The burner inserter is the most basic and slowest type of inserters. It is powered by burning fuel, compared to the more advanced inserters which are powered by electricity. It will add fuel to its own supply if it picks any up, which makes it useful for filling boilers with coal. This has the advantage that it will continue working even if the power fails, as opposed to electrically-powered inserters which will be unable to function.

In particular, when power demand drops below the supply everything starts running slower, which in turn means that the electrical inserters used to feed coal into the boilers run slower which drops the rate of electrical production. Burner inserters don't have that problem.

---

Schmitt triggers are really easy with stock multi combinators now. It isn't so much a "things have issue with flickering power" but rather "turn off the coal feed to the steel furnaces that would go to the electrical station instead" and "make sure that the coal unloading station doesn't brown out" and "turn off power to the electrical furnaces and labs to make sure that the coal mines don't dip in production rate when power dims".

The Schmitt trigger also makes for more reasonable "where is there excess oil that I should produce solid fuel from?" There's the optimal, but sometimes in the processing you can't crack any more crude to gas because the heavy oil is backed up, so turn on the appropriate cracking station when {conditions} and turn it off when {conditions}.

[LorenPechtel]

Burner inserters are stock, I didn't realize the fuel leech was now stock. It didn't used to be. And the ability to slowly grab fuel without any source of power is definitely mod. And the mod can leech fuel it's not actually handling--a burner inserter pulling from a furnace will take fuel from the furnace for it's own operation.

I'm just saying what's the need for a gap between on and off? How does the bounce harm anything in the game? Simply put the non-critical stuff behind combinators that will switch off at x% of power. Real world machinery wouldn't like that but the game factories don't care. Nor do the refineries--in your oil case, plonk down a tank of heavy oil, turn on the crackers when it's above a certain level.

[shagie]

The fuel leach has been that way for a long time.

https://wiki.factorio.com/index.php?title=Burner_inserter&ol... (edit from 2016)

> Since v0.10.0, any Fuel items picked up by a burner inserter will also be used to power the inserter. This makes it useful for:

> Automatically loading Gun turrets from a Transport belt, where one side of the belt is filled with magazines and the other with Coal.

> Filling Boilers with Coal. This has the advantage that they will continue working even if the power fails. This is not the case for electrically powered inserters.

https://wiki.factorio.com/Version_history/0.10.0#0.10.0

> Burner inserter will use item with fuel value for itself when it has empty inventory.

0.10.0 was released 2014.

---

The flickering isn't a problem (though a high frequency flicker can caused the power chart to be difficult to read).

A consistent drain on power that is causing capacitor levels to drop below some threshold suggests that certain things should be turned off before the problem becomes cascading when capacitor supply drops to 0.

[LorenPechtel]

Except that in many cases the "consistent" drain is simply night. (Or, day, on Fulgora.) Other than making the chart easier to read what's the case where a 50%/75% trigger is superior to a straight up enable if > 50%?

And apparently I misunderstood the mod, it leeches from things it could pick up but doesn't. It was probably written before it became stock and thus contained some out of date text.

[eddd-ddde]

In my server I hooked up a sound alarm to a set of capacitors. Too low of a charge indicates higher power consumption than production, allowing you to unplug certain low priority loads. I also have some emergency coal generators ready to go at the flick of a switch if needed.

Man I need to go play some more.

[somat]

Same with Satifactory, The larger powerplants need a lot of energy for their infrastructure to run and an overload will trip breakers and shut the whole grid down, a naively designed grid death spirals very easy. My factory was needing increasingly complicated black start systems so I started putting the powerplant infrastructure on a self contained islands. something a factory overload would not trip, it was something like one coal power plant can run the machinery needed for itself and 8 grid power plants.

[worldsayshi]

Thinking about this makes me wonder how all real world power plants aren't designed to survive a grid outage? Why would you ever need to black start a real power plant? Like, can't you design it so that it disengages from the grid rather than shutting down in a catastrophic outage like this? Or make it only take on a fraction of the load or something?

[crote]

The problem is that it's still steam pushing spinning rust. You can't instantly scale up or down, let alone do so in an organized fashion. If you were happily generating 1000MW out of 1500MW max, there's very little you can do if a power line goes offline and you're suddenly connected to 2000MW of load - or only 250MW. At best it's going to take tens of seconds to adjust, which in practice means you're forced to dump the entire load because in the meantime your output has deviated so much that you're causing serious damage to downstream equipment - or your own. And load shedding isn't really an option because you're now operating as an island, which means you have to instantly figure out how the grid is now connected, what the current supply/demand is, which neighborhoods should be turned off to best match the pre-incident demand, and what the impact on the local grid is - there are way too many variables there to be able to respond in a fraction of a second.

Starting back up from zero is significantly easier, as you are completely isolated and have zero load. You turn the power plant on, and start slowly adding local load to ramp up. Synchronize with neighboring plants where possible to build the grid back up. The only issue is that a power plant needs a significant amount of power to operate, so you need something to provide power before you can generate power. In most cases you can just piggyback off the grid, but in an isolated black start it means you need a beefy local independent generator setup. That costs money and it's rarely needed, so only a few designated black start plants have them, paid for by the grid as a whole.

[LorenPechtel]

Disengage from the grid and do what with the vast amount of power that suddenly has no place to go? That kind of power tends to break things. Powerplants have big cooling towers because disposing of heat is problematic.

And you're assuming that there is a throttle setting that lets the plant produce so little power that it only runs itself. Think of the Falcon 9--the landing is hairy because it's impossible for it to produce less thrust than it weighs. The engine will go out if you try to throttle it too much.

[Dylan16807]

It's hard to design a plant that can handle a drastic load reduction without shutting down entirely.

[manbitesdog]

I've been thinking EXACTLY this while listening to FM radio for the last 7 hours (we didn't even have phone line)

[baq]

They should allow you to build automatic rate-of-change-of-power-generation breakers...

[abdullahkhalids]

Factorio has logic circuits which allow you to do this.