Factorio Forums

I thought I understood this page, but now I'm not so sure. This is what I am seeing:

I have a map with a large number of both solar panels and accumulators, 34k and 38k respectively. There are no steam engines or turbines. Currently, when the factory is idle, it will pull about 920-950 MW (10k lasters, and a bunch of radars and roboports). During the day when pulling this 920-950 MW, the "Production" bar is only about 15-20% full. Seeming to indicate I could pull 5-6 times as much power if I needed to, 4-5 GW. But in the early morning when the accumulators are charging, I am pulling 2.0 GW. When this is happening, the "Production" bar is about 80-85% full. Which would seem to indicated I could only produce maybe 2.5 GW at best. What are the "Production" bars really telling me?

I get confused by this as well.

What I typically do if I can't remember is look at the number of solar panels (in your case 34,000) and multiply by 60 (power output per panel) in your case thats 2,040,000 - which is the 2 gigawatts.

You'll notice in the morning that your number one consumer of power is your accumulators, which will soak up all remaining available power until they are fully charged.

Also, I thought I read a post that the ideal ratio of solar to accumulators is .84 accumulators for every solar panel. I might be recalling that wrong, but it could be worth looking into if your accumulators are taking too long to charge.

I did the math also and came up with just over 2 GW, which didn't at the time resolve anything for me. In fact, I thought I might be doing something wrong in my calculations. But amazingly I figured this out in my sleep. No really. I woke up this morning started thinking about this post and in under a minute I realized what was happening.

After the accumulators have fully charged, their power gets added to the "available power". So, I could during the day after the accumulators were charged briefly get 4 GW by pulling 2 GW from the panels and 2 GW from the accumulators simultaneously. My error was in thinking the "Production" bar was showing me the possible capacity of the devices being used. But it is actually showing the available capacity of all power generation devices which COULD be working at that moment, even if they are currently not active.

Oh, and can someone verify the "proper" ratio is still .84 accumulators for every solar panel.