TL;DR
It would be nice if we could select electric network groups.What ?
WHAT do you suggest? What is your idea that should be changed? Explain in detail your idea.Similar to how logistic networks work, I would like a hotkey or button where I open a GUI without having to click an electric pole, to have a dropdown to see how many separate networks there are. This would make diagnosing an accidental power line deconstruction a cinch. (Maybe even a self- network, to track which devices consumed which electricity from your armor).
But the main reason I want this is to gain the ability to make a custom group, where I could say set up a bot mining station and view its isolated energy usage stats without having to create a separate power source. Ideally the energy consumption history would be saved on a per-item basis, though I don't know enough about the back-end of this game to know if this is feasible. But say, I want to look at energy usage over time for a construction machine. I add it to a group and see how much energy it has consumed. Or if I finally connect a module containing a lot of things, it would be nice to have a 'blueprint' esque entity I could use to push items into this electric network group to analyze it's energy usage-- rather than have to estimate it based on spikes on energy grids.
Why ?
WHY do you think it increases the value of Factorio as a game?I think most people operate on a one-electric grid system. I think that this would enable players to easily diagnose an accidental breaking of electric grids (if there are 2 default grids, then the player or biters have cut the line somewhere).
It would also reduce the tedium of having to click open the map, zoom in and find a random power pole when it's not convenient (i.e., as a passenger on a train or if they're far off-in the wilderness)
I also think it would empower players to analyze subsystems of their base in terms of their performance and electrical consumption, without having to approximate impact based on spikes on the graph.