When powering your base with solar power you rely on buffering to survive the night.
If your base uses more power than you have scaled your solar + accumulator farm for then you prioritise your production over your defence by using up the energy before the natives attack. In the day you want to ensure that your accumulators are charging fast enough to reach 100% before the dusk and in the night you want to make sure that your charge level is high enough to survive until dawn.
What you want is your power system to provide no more than the highest average consumption your power system can handle when supplying more means that you would then eat up your future savings. This is actually very easy. If you make an independent grid that has exactly enough solar, accumulators to power a constant drain then you can just compare your main energy storage to the level of that ideal grid and see if you are overconsuming your buffer or not. If you have 2 consumer power grids of different priority levels then you can disconnect your low priority grid when you notice that you have consumed more than you should have.
- ReliableSolar (2).png (3.09 MiB) Viewed 14443 times
Of course if the solar grid was big enough to supply power to both grids then the low priority grid will be powered on all the time. Also the high priority grid can drain the system completely. There's no point in limiting the rate at which the high priority grid can draw power since if it uses any power then it definitly needs it now and saving it for the future is pointless.
In an actual system
you would probably have your entire base that isn't dedicated to defence on the low priority network and your lasers and roboports for repairs on the high priority network. If your solar farm is big enough to power your defence then it will never fail no matter how much you expand your production base before upgrading your solar farm. Since your perimeter grows linearly when your area that you wall in grows quadratically you are unlikely to ever run out of power for lasers once your base gets fairly big. If your base needs 10 times more power than your defence then you can expand your potential production and area required 100 times before upgrading your power system and still have enough power for lasers.
Also you might want to power the combinator by it's own personal power grid with 1 solar panel and 1 accumulator in case you are going to put Creative Mode/Energy void powerful energy deleteting power system testing entities on the low prio grid. It will at least be able to switch the low grid off then.
. You could halve the size of the sunlight sensor by using 3 radars and something which consumes 150kW such as 5 small pumps on a water loop.
