Factorio Forums

See right Substation Beacon, of course, Beacon (apologies!) near the only exploited Oil wells. To the left from huge Solar panels & Accumulators field.
The beacon is stuck in Low power state despite being fully supplied through Small electric pole. Substation nearby is not connected anywhere and that's OK: I probably destroyed the wire when messing with Red Wires and Combinators (which were present near Pumpjacks).
Honestly, I can't remember exact build order for this little miracle. The only thing certain is that Small electric pole was built before Substation. And that Beacon(s. All dem near these Oil wells) was built using a blueprint (import string below), everything else nearby was placed manually. NB: I started this game on 1.1.74 (when it was Experimental, if I remember correctly). Transitioned to 1.1.76 through in-game update prompt (stand-alone client).

Save: Log (previous): Log (session at which the screenshot was made): Cheers!

I see where the issue comes from: that beacon is supplied by 2 electric networks. That entity has a primary electric network which is the small one, and the secondary electric network which is the huge network. The problem is that the huge network updates first, does not apply drain since its not a primary network of that entity, fills the buffer until its full and then small network updates, applies drain and beacon is left in that state with less-than-full state of the energy buffer. Beacon works primarily using drain and having drain applied after the energy is causes the issue to appear. In order to fix that issue, the beacon would have to change the primary network to be the one that will be updated first from all the networks it has so the drain is guaranteed to be applied first. Other solutions would be to disallow entities from being supplied from more than 1 network but that would be a huge feature deleted.

Should the feature be deleted though?
Somehow, electricity supply gauge still gets (seemingly) relevant supply data (full, with surplus energy available in the network), unlike 'no/low/full power' info. Which does not feel entirely right regardless of particular processing sequence: if demand was satisfied, it was satisfied (and should look so in all relevant UI pieces). If it wasn't - it wasn't.
Maybe some steps in the power supply sequence are worth being looked into. Although depending on what actually happens under the hood it may or may not lead to such 'buildings-on-the-edge' serving as bridges which pass small amounts of energy between networks. Which doesn't feel entirely wrong (assuming that indeed non-accumulator buildings CAN have some energy drained back to network. If these can't... then my education is not enough to imagine real sequence of events, probably. Again ).

I'm going to move this to minor issues since I don't see any sane way for us to address this.