Giant Capacitors

[azoundria]

So I know this is a technology that does not exist at present in the real world (and neither do coal-powered grabbers), but there are numerous advances in this general direction.

Essentially, it would be a giant battery/capacitor that would store up charge and release it later. So, if you use solar panels, it can charge up in the daytime, and release the power at night. You could have a clean electric system.

I haven't researched all the techs, so my apologies if this does already exist.

[mngrif]

Stuff like this is planned, and very much does exist in real life. They usually take strange shapes, such as pumping a bunch of water up in to a lake, then draining it through turbines to reclaim the power. Hospitals and large important buildings such as the telephone company's central office use giant flywheels (100's of tons) that spin up and are kept spinning, then release the energy when the power gets cut. Other places use massive battery banks that take up entire floors and multiple people to maintain (you have to keep adding acid to them or else it will evaporate, with so many batteries it turns out to be a lot of work). Giant super caps do exist, but they are very expensive compared to the methods I just named. The real-life special thing about them is that they can be charged very quickly and discharged very quickly (you're limited by heat), but their capacity isn't as good as a normal AGM cell battery of the same size. They are better suited to electric cars than being an uninterpretable power supply (UPS).

I'm a fan of the giant flywheels. They can get very efficient, and who doesn't like the idea of 300 tons spinning at 1000 RPM? As a nice fun added bonus, when they fail, they usually explode releasing all of that energy in one big boom. For this reason they are built underground. In game, since there is no underground (yet), building them on the surface would open them up to attack...

[kwiz]

Stuff like this is planned, and very much does exist in real life. They usually take strange shapes, such as pumping a bunch of water up in to a lake, then draining it through turbines to reclaim the power. Hospitals and large important buildings such as the telephone company's central office use giant flywheels (100's of tons) that spin up and are kept spinning, then release the energy when the power gets cut. Other places use massive battery banks that take up entire floors and multiple people to maintain (you have to keep adding acid to them or else it will evaporate, with so many batteries it turns out to be a lot of work). Giant super caps do exist, but they are very expensive compared to the methods I just named. The real-life special thing about them is that they can be charged very quickly and discharged very quickly (you're limited by heat), but their capacity isn't as good as a normal AGM cell battery of the same size. They are better suited to electric cars than being an uninterpretable power supply (UPS).

I'm a fan of the giant flywheels. They can get very efficient, and who doesn't like the idea of 300 tons spinning at 1000 RPM? As a nice fun added bonus, when they fail, they usually explode releasing all of that energy in one big boom. For this reason they are built underground. In game, since there is no underground (yet), building them on the surface would open them up to attack...

Exploding giant flywheels sounds fantastic though...

[Shalashalska]

Giant flywheels would be nice, especially to make solar power more practical, right now it's almost useless. And if they get destroyed by an attack, then they explode with a different size depending on their charge, and also will break at higher health if they have more charge (if it's moving really fast it is easy to break it, if it's not moving it's pretty darn hard) and the explosion will do damage to everything around it.