Factorio Forums

BlakeMW wrote: I don't disagree with the spirit of this statement, but technically productivity converts energy into items, so it can be meaningfully treated as a coal->items or a uranium->items conversion.

Solar Power.

But yeah, I agree with everything in your post.

Syrchalis wrote:

BlakeMW wrote: I don't disagree with the spirit of this statement, but technically productivity converts energy into items, so it can be meaningfully treated as a coal->items or a uranium->items conversion.

Solar Power.

For what it's worth the reason I'm not that fond of analyzing in terms of Solar Power, is that if there is unused coal it tends to be a lot cheaper to make miners + coal power, and if there is unused uranium then nuclear power is also a lot cheaper than solar assuming you are building on a large scale, altough that scale is not that large - the usage threshold where it becomes cheaper to research and build nuclear power is about 60MW in standard and 200MW in Marathon. So chances are solar power is going to end up more expensive in terms of opportunity cost than coal or nuclear. As such, despite being "free" it's still the most expensive way to generate electricity.

BlakeMW wrote: For what it's worth the reason I'm not that fond of analyzing in terms of Solar Power, is that if there is unused coal it tends to be a lot cheaper to make miners + coal power, and if there is unused uranium then nuclear power is also a lot cheaper than solar assuming you are building on a large scale, altough that scale is not that large - the usage threshold where it becomes cheaper to research and build nuclear power is about 60MW in standard and 200MW in Marathon. So chances are solar power is going to end up more expensive in terms of opportunity cost than coal or nuclear. As such, despite being "free" it's still the most expensive way to generate electricity.

The main problem with solar power is that you have to store a huge amount of energy if you rely only on solar power only and if you have a a base just a little bigger than "small" in general. That is making solar power extremly inefficient for using in a big environment.

For me. there are only two reasons to use solar power:

For little radar outposts in the middle of nowhere - so that you don't have to set poles for every radar station. And as second to catch situations of higher energy consumption peaks in the factory.

Greetings, Ronny

rldml wrote: The main problem with solar power is that you have to store a huge amount of energy if you rely only on solar power only and if you have a a base just a little bigger than "small" in general. That is making solar power extremly inefficient for using in a big environment.

Well accumulators don't cost much, especially now in 0.15 that oil is very abundant.

You need 0.84 accumulators per solar panel,
the solar panel costs 40 iron ore + 37.5 copper ore
0.84 of an accumulator costs 7.6 iron ore, 4.2 copper ore and roughly 63 (6.3) oil

Which means the accumulators only cost 23% as much as the solar panels.

And as second to catch situations of higher energy consumption peaks in the factory.

Accumulators are indeed great for covering demand spikes, they are basically the cheapest way to get "momentary" megawattage - potentially even cheaper than steam engines depending how you value iron, copper and oil and your use of productivity modules. I usually provide at least half as much accumulator megawattage as my turbine megawattage.