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Realistic Coal Power Plant
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3.298 MB
11 Mar, 2021 @ 9:59am
14 Mar, 2021 @ 1:22pm
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Realistic Coal Power Plant

Description
This is the stock coal power plant with one modification:
25.2 times the coal usage.

This puts electricity production on the same, or close, scale as the heating plant.


Why 25.2?

I was interested in finding the scale difference in the power and heating industries.

It was worked out like so:

The max Electrical output the power plant is 1400 MWh/workday,
Assuming a neither great nor terrible thermal effiency for the power plant of 30 percent - trippling the electrical output gives us an approximate maximum thermal output of 4200MWh/workday

Converting MWh to GJ for comparison with the heating plant, burning 24 tons of coal in the powerplant, releases about 15120 GJ of heat. Or 630 GJ per ton. Which is completely unrealistic.

For the heating plant, it's max thermal output is 210 GJ (or 58.33 MWh). And it's maximum consumption is 8.4t/workday. 25 GJ per ton. Which is suspiciously realistic.

Correlating these, we come to the conclusion that the power plant needs to consume 25.2 times the amount of coal to work on a similar scale to the heating plant.

The maximum consumption for one of these is 604 tons / workday. 430 kg per MWh.

In the real world, generating 1 MWh of electricity requires about half a ton of coal. Close enough.

The maximum conveyor capacity of 10 tons/s is reached at about 23MW.

Everything is copied directly from the game with the only change being the coal consumption. And icon.

Some videos on it:
https://youtu.be/iay42SLyFSg
https://youtu.be/V1heQo9fEhA
https://youtu.be/F_90RdBNvX0
12 Comments
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Star_origin 19 Jul @ 7:05am 
I totally agree with the idea of coal consumption because a common realistic coal power plant uses 0.3-0.4 kg coal to generate 1 kWh electricity.

Less consumption of coal in the game can be considered as a compromise. A real coal mine can use machine to exploit coal automatically and therefore has a higher production capacity...... but in game a coal mine can only produce hundreds of tons of coal.
George Rockwell 18 Apr @ 9:37am 
i wonder how much coal a mine in the game produces vs a real life mine? maybe the numbers make sense if theyre both scaled down?
Shotkey 15 Feb, 2022 @ 10:06pm 
Thank you, sir. Nice calculation, I made this changes to the vanilla one
Dr. Pluring  [author] 4 Apr, 2021 @ 3:14am 
...However, whilst electricity production is so cheap, I can understand why some would feel it be too easy. It really wouldn't be if the power plant wasn't a cheating magical energy-machine generating 25 times more energy than it should.

I've been pondering an electrical heat plant/exchanger mod, that actually uses the correct amount of power, the ones I've seen on the workshop use an insane amount of power, maybe to not make them to overpowered with the vanilla electricity generation. But I don't think it can be made to work without workers, and then the point is sort of lost.

@Others
Thank you :)
Dr. Pluring  [author] 4 Apr, 2021 @ 3:14am 
@Comrade Sky
There are so many different time scales at play here, the more you try and understand it, the less sense it makes. To me anyways. However, the point of this mod is the energy density of coal. And I'm not sure if/how this 60-hour day affects it. 1 ton of coal is 1 ton of coal and holds the same amount of energy regardless doesn't it?

That said, I'd like to see an overhaul of the energy system. The HV limit of 18MW makes no sense, it feels more like a bodge to get it working in the game. It prevents us from building a proper HV grid with multiple power plants as we'll always be limited to 18MW per circuit, hence lots of different circuits, not one grid. Electricity should be much more expensive to generate (i.e. take more coal, or the NPP should be more expensive to build). Electrical heating should be possible, take no workers and use the correct amount of energy....
Dr. Pluring  [author] 4 Apr, 2021 @ 3:13am 
...Many hard challanges forbids the export of electricity, which I can sort get on board with, electricity is far to cheap to produce with the vanilla coal power plant. I'd make the argument that turning up the fuel consumption 25 times makes it fair game to export.

I've not looked in to the numbers for energy density / balance for nuclear power. But the NPP is definitively far too cheap to build. About twice the price of the coal power plant if memory serves? Yes RBMK reactors where relatively cheap, simple and cost effective to build, but not that cheap I don't think? If we want to keep with reality, a Nuclear power plant should be an enormous investment to build, once built, the cost for fuel should be quite low. Whilst chemically combusting power plants are the other way around - cheap to build, expensive and bulky fuel.
Dr. Pluring  [author] 4 Apr, 2021 @ 3:12am 
@asdg5
I've done a bit of experimenting. First impressions where that turning over this much coal had a noticable effect on the "global" economy. But having run it even further, I'm unsure if it really makes a difference or not. Inflation compounds and spirals no matter what, and since I don't have a proper baseline to which I could compare, I can't say. To find out I suppose one would have to have two identical worlds, one with the vanilla plant and one with this one, let it run for 5-10 years and look at the various graphs.

This only deals with the energy density of the fuel for the coal plant. Putting it in the ballpark of real world values, just as heating. It ticked me off a bit when heating was introduced, and it was on a completely different scale from electricity. Considering we're dealing with the same thing - energy. You will still get the same amount of money for 1 MWh but it will take 25 times as much coal. So yes, less profit...
asdg5 2 Apr, 2021 @ 6:46am 
What about price of 1MWh? If we spand 25 times more coal then vanilla plant price of 1MWh should be more 25 times. I mean if we not a change price of electricity, export electricity will be not a profit. Did you check it? What about nuclear power plant?
soiieu 28 Mar, 2021 @ 3:09pm 
my brain say,"YES"
Comrade Sky 22 Mar, 2021 @ 4:34am 
The game has 60 hours instead of 24 hours, and isn't really balanced for the real world. I hope they rebalance everything eventually.