power plants

Discussion about Production and Resources

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Manucleiton
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Post by Manucleiton »

Balthagor wrote:I was more wondering if there was something in the real world on which we could model it. Even the mechs in our game use a lot of real technologies currenlty in development.
Hydro-Québec is improving its hydro power plants, using I believe lighter parts, such as the turbines, to improve the efficiency of the plants. It's expected to provide as much as 400 MW more, not sure about the exact amount, for the same installations.
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bergsjaeger
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Post by bergsjaeger »

I figured the generators or turbines are the key to finding an advancement. So like Manucleiton has stated why not just make a tech along the lines of better turbines but 400 MW isn't much of an improvement. How about a 15% increase in production. Course the tech has to have a name.
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Bateman1982
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Post by Bateman1982 »

A simple question (if there is such a thing) regarding power plants:

The maths done by tkobo clearly shows that its sensible economically to run coal / oil plants rather than hydro plants providing you have the raw materials to do so.

The maintenance cost of nuclear reactors however seems particularly high. Has anyone done any tests on whether its more efficient to run several coal / oil plants rather than a single nuclear plant?

I should really work it out myself, but I thought I'd just ask the question first in case someone has already looked at it.
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tkobo
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Post by tkobo »

Not i yet.But i suspect it would come out the same way.With coal and oil plants cheaper than nuke.
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Il Duce
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Post by Il Duce »

Did some math on it a while back, but lost the notes - basically,
nuclear is an option for petro-poor regions. If you've
got the oil or coal, nuclear is kind of a waste. If you don't,
and you DO have minerals, nuclear can help offset the risk and load of petro-power. believe your eyes on the overheads.
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Eric Larsen
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Fusion Power Rocks!

Post by Eric Larsen »

I've discovered the joys of fusion power lately. The note in the update notes that the cold fusion tech doesn't give 100% of the benefit stated made me shy away from these plants for a while. However when I built some then got cold fusion I noticed that they damn near doubled their output which is fine with me. Other power is nice before getting fusion power but then fusion power becomes my energy source of choice. Big production amounts like over a million units per day per plant for fusion power with cold fusion. I also make sure to upgrade my power techs as that really helps plus there's one that ups all power generation 10%.

In my current game I'm producing 121 million units of power per day, that's correct per day. I have all of my remaining petrol power plants turned off to conserve petrol since I'm burning through 303 million units per day of that resource. I found fusion power to be an economy saver.
Thanks,

Eric Larsen
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bergsjaeger
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Post by bergsjaeger »

:lol: Well Fusion saves money in sense. Don't have to use resources to fuel them. But I think the mainantce cost is higher than the others except the nuclear ones which I think are very similar to the fusion. In all I end up with all Fusion plants and scrap all the others. No use in having them around if I'm not gonna use them.
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bluntobj
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Post by bluntobj »

Yes, fusion rocks after the cold fusion tech. Mine put out over a million MwH per plant.

Funnily enough, they show that they are at 102% condition in the resource screen reached from a double click on the plant.
Psychomonkey
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Post by Psychomonkey »

Superconducting power lines would be an excellent real-world tech to implement in 2010.

http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/v38 ... le11.shtml

Also increased efficiency in solar cells ...

http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:z5v ... =clnk&cd=4

... which takes the average efficiency of 9% with current technology to 35%, making solar energy much more economically viable.
BigStone
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Post by BigStone »

Good post Psychomonkey....

Superconductors are already in the game : "AdvancedSuperconductors lvl 107 "
Unfortunate they don't give you a -direct- advantage.You'll need this science for a couple of other techs (fusionpower, electro-thermalsystems)

But i agree it should give you a direct boost (lets say 10% :-? ) to your power output.

For the efficiency in -alternative- powerplants the game has already a dozen of availble techs to boost the -green- production.
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felinis
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Power Plants

Post by felinis »

Once I cornered the oil market on the WWII scenerio, I did a review of my power plant portfolio to determine which ones to keep and which ones to scrap.

Keep in mind that this rating reflects operating costs and fuel, and ignores how much the plants cost to build in the first place.

1. Hydro
2. Coal *
3. Fusion
4. Other
5. Nuclear
6. Petrolium #

* Coal has a high pollution penalty.
# Petrol power is VERY expensive. In most ways, the petrol plants are exactly like their coal counterparts, and the fuel units cost about the same - barrels of oil vs. tonnes of coal. But the striking difference is the staggering number of units of petrol required for an equivalent capacity -
about 100 million barrels of oil vs. only 5 million tonnes of coal per year, for the same 25 million KW of power.

I think that this is a big mistake in SR2010, and it explaines why all of the AI players are constantly complaining of electrical power shortages - they are paying ten times as much for electrical power because most of them have oil fueled power plants. And the AIs are not intelligent enough to replace them.

Another mistake is the quantity of uranium fuel required for nuclear reactors - way too high and unrealistic.
Last edited by felinis on Dec 23 2006, edited 1 time in total.
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Balthagor
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Re: Power Plants

Post by Balthagor »

felinis wrote:...Another mistake is the quantity of uranium fuel required for nuclear reactors - way too high and unrealistic.
I'll try and point George to this thread for all your issues, but I'll admit I'm sckeptical that you've caught us on this one, I remember George researching this twice, once to get the basic relationships then once more to refine it and get the balance right. I personnally have no idea...
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felinis
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Post by felinis »

On the subject of uranium - it just occured to me - uranium mines produce uranium ORE, but power plants run on highly refined uranium METAL.

So maybe the numbers are correct for uranium after all - the figure is so large because it represents the tonnes of ore necessary to produce the few hundred pounds of real uranium fuel required per year.
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BigStone
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Post by BigStone »

felinis wrote: So maybe the numbers are correct for uranium after all - the figure is so large because it represents the tonnes of ore necessary to produce the few hundred pounds of real uranium fuel required per year.
Yep .... i while back i did some checks about that and didn't found any strange things about the uranusage in SR2010.
Lost my notes .... :oops:
But maybe this helps:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_ma ... rk_unit.29

A large nuclear power station with a net electrical capacity of 1,300 MW requires about 25,000 kg of enriched uranium annually with a 235U concentration of 3.75%. This quantity is produced from about 210,000 kg of raw uranium
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felinis
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Post by felinis »

OK - you got me doing my homework on this. The KWH equivalent of the fuels, based upon their thermal energy:

fuel oil = 1848 KWH/barrel
coal = 6150 KWH/ton

This makes sense, since the mass of a ton of coal would exceed the mass of a barrel of fuel oil by at least 3:1.

Fossil fuel power plants are just 40% effecient, so only 40% of the fuel would be converted to electricity.

However, in the real world, fuel oil is not crude oil. Modern petroleum plants yield 45% gasoline and just 4.4% fuel oil for a given unit of petroleum. This can change, depending upon what grade of fuel they are targeting. The point is that there is no way to compare the crude oil output of a oil field to the refined fuel oil required in a petroleum fueled power plant.

With uranium, you could estimate that, in the game, n% of your uranium ore in usable reactor fuel - but we have no reasonable basis for estimating its hyper-refined cost.

It is the same with fuel oil - in the game, I have no reasonable way of putting a price on the fuel oil required to run a 500 Megawatt power plant.

So in the SR2010 game world, we must assume that uranium ore and crude oil equal fuel - no problem.

My calculations of cost to produce electricity in SR2010 in $/KWH:
Hydro: 0.015
Coal: 0.017
Fusion: 0.0195
Other: 0.03
Nuclear 0.0438
Petrol 0.225

This does not include capital investment.

Statistically, petrol seems way off, however:

A barrel of fuel oil wholesale costs four times as much as a ton of coal, and yields 1/3 the energy/per unit. If coal produced electricity meters out at 1.7 cents/KWH in the year 2020, when fuel oil generated electricity would be 12 * 1.7 cents = 20.4 cents/KWH. In real life Japan is paying 17.5 cents/KWH today, so it is easy to image 22 cents/KWH in the year 2020.

Yea George!
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