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Electricity 101.

By FUS

So, you want to build a power grid through your entire republic? Provide electricity to everyone, be it a backwater village at the border, or a thriving city spanning kilometers inside of your heartland?
It is a noble and mostly simple task, yes... Yet, extremely time consuming, due to the amount of forward planning required, and the difficulties what come with it.

Award

Created by

FUS
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Category: Gameplay Basics

Languages: English

Posted

Updated

18 Mar, 2019 @ 7:54am

23 Jan, 2023 @ 7:14am

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Guide Index

Overview

The basics.

Voltage and Wattage.

Types of power lines.

Buildings and power line Switches.

Putting it all together.

The end.

Comments

The basics.

First things first, you need a power source, be it a domestic power plant, foreign import, or both.

For the latter, find a checkpoint at the border (like the one above, soviet for a price in rubles, western for dollars), and build a High Voltage power line from the transformer next to said checkpoint, all the way to an available connection in your grid (it will look like a big yellow triangle).

After the connection's establised, click on the aforementioned transformer, then open the Import (purchase) mode, and choose how much energy you want to buy, by using - + buttons.
For starters, I would recommend you to buy the maximum amount until you have your own power production in place, and consider selling in the future.

Voltage and Wattage.

Voltage can be considered as an amount of supply any particular power station gets, while the Wattage as the utilities’ demand for it. The more Wattage you have, the more Voltage production will be needed from your power source to compensate, and of course, the more Voltage, the better, otherwise, blackouts will happen.

Types of power lines.

Note: At the time of writing this more types of power lines were added into the game, both HV and MV, providing more flexibility to the power management.

The lines themselves are separated by two voltage types:

High voltage (HV) lines are needed if you there to transfer power from one big city to another, I.e. kilometers away from each other. Factories and villages close-by are usually connected to the nearby city's grid by medium power lines, it will be more than enough for them.

Medium voltage (MV) lines are the most common and the most important, they power up your city's buildings and facilities through the use of electric substations.

MV variants: 0.65 MW (left), 1.20 MW (middle), 2.20 MW (right). 0.65 and 1.20 fit well for a role of electrifying villages, their wattage is pretty low, so they won't put too much pressure on your budget and power production.

Buildings and power line Switches.

Power plant

If the power lines are the city's veins, then a Power plant is the city's heart. It produces electricity by burning refined coal. Also works as a substation.
Has 2 HV, and 4 MV slots at the back, 3 slots for conveyors in front.
Can be connected to an unloading aggregate, if you want to deliver coal to it from a separate road, or to shorten the distance for the aforementioned delivery (however, it doesn't actually need one, trucks can be ordered to unload directly into the Plant itself, though it takes longer to do so).
Electric substation

Those are the end point of your grid, they allow nearby buildings to be electrified using the low voltage underground wiring (they do so automatically in a radius).
Only one MV slot is present, and a road connection for a construction team.
Power Transformer

The name is self-explanatory, transforms High Wattage electrical energy into Medium Wattage, so it then can be distributed to the local substations, which in turn will power the buildings next to them.
Has 1 HV connection, 6 MV connections, and 2 road connections so a construction team can reach it.
HV and MV switches

These things allow you to branch out of your main power line, extremely useful for the occasions when you want to build a mine or a factory somewhere off the beaten path, in places with no free transformers or substations present.
They have 3 slots each, and a road connection so a construction team can reach them.

Putting it all together.

Note: At the time of writing this more types of power lines were added into the game, providing you with more flexibility on how you can manage the electrical grid.

Below I made an example of how it all works, but on a smaller scale.

As you can see, the HV lines are making a circle (yellow) so what in a case of disconnection power could still be delivered to the cities further down the line, and the MV connections from the power plant are providing electricity directly to the local town (orange) and villages (green).

Another example, but this time there is no power plant nearby, so we'll have to use a local transformer instead (yellow for 2.20 MW, orange for 1.20 MW, green for 0.65 MW).

The end.

And what concludes my guide. If you've found any mistakes, or have questions, please leave them in the comments below.

Thanks for reading.

46 Comments

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UnicornPoacher 10 Jul, 2024 @ 8:53pm

Hello, do transformers cap out delivering 2 MW?

Dr.Thrax 28 Jun, 2024 @ 7:16am

This guide needs to be updated after 1.0 released as Electric substation has 3 MV slots now.

Name's Garth 22 Mar, 2022 @ 8:54am

What you should therefore do is this:
-Create a new bus stop
-Select an apartment or two with, altogether, 3-4x the number of workers you want employed at your power plant (make sure to set the worker cap to the max you want, don't be lazy and try to let the system do it on its own)
-Mark them to use a dedicated powerplant bus stop nearby using the button next to "Where should citizens be going to work?"
-Create a new line of minibuses (how many you need will depend on how far away the power plant is, guess, then add or remove as needed) between the power plant and the new powerplant stop
-Launch the bus line and let the system run

Name's Garth 22 Mar, 2022 @ 8:54am

@End_of_track - It's probable that you have too few workers in your republic for all the jobs you have. Note that work days are divided into three 8 hour shifts. This means that you actually need AT LEAST 3x the number of worker slots to keep a plant fully staffed during the day at the stated capacity. In addition, you need to make sure that the plant is serviced with workers frequently enough that you don't have them gaps where no one is working. From the infopage for apartments, you can set where workers go when they're looking for jobs. ANY site that accepts workers will be taken as an input for this, including bus stations

spartainman64 5 Feb, 2022 @ 3:34pm

I'm having issues with placement of wind turbines. It seems that no matter where I place them, they do not generate any power, even when I place them on top of larges hills and mountains. Do they need to face a certain way or is there a way to know which way the wind is blowing?

jockeril 29 Dec, 2021 @ 9:28am

@end_of_Track - most likely workers are going to construction if there is any since (I think) it takes presidence over any other job site, so either get more workers (housing and food+meat) or do less construction.

you can check that out - stop all construction for a month and watch your workers - see where they go and when - it's good practice to do that anyway from time to time

Sleeper____ 28 Dec, 2021 @ 1:03pm

I'm having problems with the outputs of power. My main sources are a coal and oil (modded) power plants along with a few wind turbines and solar fields. Not many people want to work in them even with them being the only job around. The Production they have are almost nothing and green energy isn't constant. I'd like to know if there is a way to fix this. I'm getting tired of the street lights having seizures.

FUS [author] 23 Mar, 2021 @ 1:16pm

Hi, and ty for the detailed post.
Yeah, I know what LV exists in the game, I have mentioned it in the Electric Substation discription, what's pretty much all the extent of ingame interaction with it, afaik.

ticho 23 Mar, 2021 @ 12:17pm

...When you add another (large) consumer, the amount of (input) energy consumed is greater than the (output) amount produced. In this case, the voltage drop. Consumers have less than the input they need and slow down their work. When the voltage is very low, the consumer stops producing it. This is a power outage, blackout.

As a side effect, there is a lower energy transfer efficiency as the voltage drops, especially when the distance is very high.

The amount of power transferred depends on the capacity of the power line, which is described in the game. Therefore, always select the correct type of power line, depending on the amount of power (wattage) being transported.

If the game used somewhere is a measuring unit "MWh", it means MegaWatt hour, simply divide the value by 60 and the result is the amount of imputed power, for select appropriate powerline and consumption.
Hope it hleps.

ticho 23 Mar, 2021 @ 12:16pm

Hi, thanks for this tutorial. Small notices about power and voltage. Since the game is based on real physics as possible, like IRL here we have three (!) levels of voltage. HV and MV is used for transport electricity, MV and LV (Low voltage) is used by end users for consumption. Industrial buildings often use MV for consumption. Voltage depends on type, so HV=110kV, MV=22kV. LV=220V. That's it.

Power (Wattage) depends on each one particular building / engine demand and represent needed input for correct function. Is measured using MW (kW, W). The game describes the amount of power that each energy consumer needs.

Well, how does it work? When the power plant starts generating electricity, we have few consumers at the other end. When consumers have less input than the output from the power station, everything works fine. The whole output is not consumed by all users and the rest can be exported (or left), for example. (to be continued)

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