Trashed's power system works on a grid. Each cell is either powered, or it's not. While making your power system, your goal will be to power every cell of your factory. However, it's not always as simple as placing down a single solar panel and every cell becoming magically powered.

Understanding how power propagates between cells is important if you want to make a battery backup system that works. Sometimes you'll end up with a setup where your batteries will charge but they won't power the rest of your factory, or vice versa. Without this understanding, it could take quite a while to figure out the problem.

Whenever a structure wants to output some power, it outputs to some structure-specific adjacent cells. Certain other structures like conveyor belts or cables will re-emit any power they receive.

Solar generators and windmills will, depending on weather/time of day, offer power to all adjacent cells. Batteries will offer power whenever they hold a charge, and absorb any excess power when they need to recharge.

Machines, conveyor belts, discharged batteries and other structures will consume some of the power they receive, and emit the rest. Since incinerators do not require power, they also do not re-emit any, meaning an incinerator will not power adjacent conveyor belts.

Cables are special, in that they only re-emit power at their two ends. They do not emit power in all directions like conveyors or generator structures do. This means that a naive corner built with cables could accidentally only let power flow in one direction:



While limiting the direction of power flow can be useful, battery backups need to connect in both directions. As far as I'm aware, no other structure does, but more may be added in the future.

The solution is to use the double-ended nature of cables and build a loop, like this:



Power can flow in both directions, making this an effective way to couple generators to a battery bank.

Meanwhile, this just flat-out wouldn't work:

I barely have 1.9 hours in this game and I'm about to refund it, so sorry if the guide is a bit minimal. Hopefully though, it'll get you started experimenting if you want to figure out the energy behavior of a structure! Feel free to post your findings in the comments and I'll get them added to the guide.

This is also just generally useful knowledge to have, and should help with factory building. It also might become out of date when/if someone reworks the power system, but for now, this is what we have.