Base consuming more power than it should

[scottmsul]

I was working on my kovarex setup, when out of nowhere, my entire power grid shut down. I was quite surprised when I saw a satisfaction of 0/9.5 GW in my ~300 MW base. Fortunately I had some autosaves so I could replay how the problem developed.

In the earliest autosave (21:10:00) things seemed pretty normal. The base was consuming 324 MW, satisfaction was full but that's because the accumulators were charging.

factorio_power_bug_21_10.PNG (428.89 KiB) Viewed 3307 times

In the next autosave (21:15:00) the base was consuming a bit more power. Here it was at 336 MW but the accumulators were now discharging.

factorio_power_bug_21_15.PNG (455.55 KiB) Viewed 3307 times

In the most recent autosave (21:20:00) the base was consuming way too much power at 530 MW.

factorio_power_bug_21_20.PNG (448.68 KiB) Viewed 3307 times

In my most recent actual save (21:21:05) the base was up to 771 MW.

factorio_power_bug_21_21.PNG (474.94 KiB) Viewed 3307 times

After loading and waiting a minute it climbed exponentially and topped off at 9.5 GW.

factorio_power_bug_21_22.PNG (446.88 KiB) Viewed 3307 times

Any idea how this could happen? The total energy consumption is way higher than the sum of each item's individual consumptions, so it seems like there might be a bug somewhere.

I should note that the problem happened while I was playing on 1.1.46, but I updated to 1.1.50 for the bug report and the problem was still occurring.

I've attached the 3 autosaves and the most recent actual save (all_research_16.zip).

Some notes about my base if it'll help debugging:
- I was setting up kovarex when this happened. The centrifuges have prod 1 modules and are surrounded by speed 2 beacons.
- There are some ghost accumulators mixed in with the actual accumulators.
- I had recently placed some roboports to the south.
- I have lots of laser turrets that spike the power usage.

[Nexarius]

First roboports consume more power when you are using the bots -> placing blueprints etc. (charging the bots is literally directly increasing your power consumption)

Once the accumulators reached 0% the consumption increased to show the total power needed to charge ALL accumulators with maximum speed since they were no longer used as power producers.

After everything shutoff because of the blackout it showed the necessary power to simultaneously power on ALL machines / inserters / roboports with their respectivly maximum power consumption.
It takes a lot more power to get an inserter from 0% power to 100% (look inserter tooltip it has an internal battery) than just to keep it at 100% when its running (a lot more in this case is still VERY LOW comparativly to beacons etc. but it adds up because you have thousands)


If you turn your power production on again you would see that the consumption would quickly go down back to normal because it only takes like 1-2 secs to charge up all inserters / assemblers again.

[Silari]

To add some numbers: a roboport that doesn't have a full energy buffer will draw 5MW of power until it does - that's significantly more than even the max power usage of 4.05MW from charging four robots at once. A beacon uses a max of 480kW of power, but if i's buffer isn't full it'll draw up 2.4MW of power. The max draw of buildings is higher than their max consumption, because they need to be able to refill their buffer even when working at max load.

Those are why your base as a whole is drawing more when your power is low. When you fix the power situation, draw will return to it's normal levels.

[orzelek]

Can you please make your question a bit more clear?

You seem to be asking about base power consumption but you are discussing numbers shown in Satisfaction part. And thats one of most misleading stats on this screen.
It works decently until your base won't start going above your power production and after that it will be more and more misleading. This is caused by the fact that every entity has an enrgy buffer and max satisfaction is a total of free space in that buffers (if I understood that correctly). So when you don't have enough power generated those buffers will slowly drain and satisfaction displayed will go up. This is because most entities have those buffers set to twice their power usage, some has even more.

[DodoBello]

edit:

I think I found the bug - if you even want to call the little thing a bug. However, it had confused and misdirected me when building the factory.

The "max. consumption" of a laser turret is not as stated at max. 3.86 MW, but at max. 9.60 MW (+220% speed). This results in the apparently inexplicably high consumption after an energy shortage. But it is quite logical that the "max. consumption" also increases with the upgrades, otherwise the laser turret would not be able to deliver its 4.8 shots with 800 kJ per second.

In other words, an upgraded laser turret that is no longer fully charged when there is a power shortage (800 kJ energy storage device that discharges with 24 kW) requests an energy quantity of almost 10 MW for charging.

But this is not a bug - only the display "max. consumption" could change to "3.86 MW + 5.74 MW" like the other parameters after the upgrade. Instead of continuing to display the incorrect 3.86 MW after the upgrade.

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From a user perspective I can confirm this bug.

For me, the bug appears as follows: In phases in which the power consumption is slightly higher than the production, this extreme power requirement occurs at a certain point. This only resolves itself when the electricity requirement that has been incorrectly collected over time can be processed through overproduction. This often doesn't happen, however, since the extreme power consumption means that the base is standing still, but the unfulfilled consumption continues to be added up (chain reaction).

A fix of the best game ever would be great