Another issue to consider is that Speed and Production only have real net reductions to pollution or energy cost/per item when used together. Or more specifically, it lowers the total production cost per Item... which indirectly lowers all the demands associated with intermediary and raw material processing.
Boilers, however, throw a huge monkey wrench into any practical attempt at energy/pollution control for a factory. Basically any gains from Prod/Spd combo is essentially lost to Boiler pollution from the extra Electricity demand. Same with Electric Furnaces over Steel. But Solar is also also really resource intensive to setup for high capacity (over 10MW) production, between the panels, accumulators and raw tile space needed.
If you're trying for pollution control, the easiest way to go about it is focusing your research into Solar, Inserter Bonuses (to get the +1 non-stack bonus), Eff Modules, and Nuclear- and to minimize your production space and expansion as much as possible.
Try to keep steam power under 10MW.... 5MW is ideal, but at some point you might need the extra capacity, so I build that anyway. Solar and Eff modules are the first 2 things I work on. It gets stupidly hard to produce anything past blue lab on that power budget without Eff modules.... so thats a convenient marker to know when you need Eff modules. Theres also no real benefit to using Eff2 over Eff1, as the Blue Circuit are too expensive to research and produce to make it worth while. 3 Eff1 in every mining drill cuts your total power demand by almost 30% on its own. With Eff1 in everything (at AM2s), I believe the total power reduction is roughly 50% overall. Once you get there, you can realistically run a factory up to purple lab on pure solar power.
Also if you can, try to build your Steam power (or at least your boilers) and Smelters in chunks surrounded by trees. This dramatically contains the spread of pollution until you get everything on to Nuclear power.
Second.... Don't bother using Electric Furnaces until you have Nuclear power. Even with Eff modules, their overall electricity demand adds up too fast to be a replacement for Steel Furnaces without a butt ton of solar power. If you want to trade off, using Electric Furnaces for remote steel production (where its too much pain to run coal), can be viable..... unless its for making rails (for purple). I run into this problem every time; even 2 AM2s need over a dozen furnaces pumping out steel to keep them going at full speed...... and purples need a LOT of rails.
Third, Unlock Uranium Processing as soon as reasonably possible, and start ...... processing uranium. You're gonna need to do a lot for this next step. And the time required to means you're gonna wanna start this early.
Forth (or 2.5), have Purple Science production up, and research what you need for Kovarex Enrichment. Once you have 43 U-235 need for enrichment, Start doing it. Once you have this done, you basically have nigh-unlimited nuclear fuel. Note that if you want to start Nuclear power before enrichment is established, every U-245 used for a fuel cell adds around 30 minutes (divided by number of centrifuges) to the time it takes to get it going. Either way, I would highly recommend looking up Blue Prints for a No-waste Turbine setup, since Nuclear fuel burns regardless of power consumption, AND Build a Circuit breaker on your Steam plant to disconnect it from the power grid on-demand.
This creates a huge decision on what you want to do. Since uranium processing takes a ton of time to do, and anything involving (or beyond) purple research takes a ton of energy to make all the packs in parallel, you'll probably be spending a lot of time waiting on it before being able to retool your factory for electric smelting and yellow packs. However, its entirely possible to clear out the remaining research for Blue and Grey packs on just Solar power.
You can also spend that wait time getting train systems setup to other ore patches, since theres a really good chance you're close to (or already have) used up everything in short range of the starting area by the time you got purple packs going. With Eff modules, you can run most drilling operations with a single solar field and accumulator bank.
I usually use this (see link) for the panels, plus a sub-station sized accumulator bank, with mixed gun and laser turrets. It needs an open field though... and you'll want to avoid cutting down trees if you can help it, since that keeps the drilling pollution from spreading (and thus attracting attention). Thats good enough for keeping small attacks at bay. But if they start escalating, you have to consider rolling out something more sophisticated; which adds more logistics problems; or abandon the site and come back later with more fire power. At this point in the game, you're either ahead or behind their evolution progress..... and you're gonna feel the cumulative effect of your play speed (and efficiency) as you try to find more raw resources to cart in for late game.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/ ... =658756067
I play the low pollution runs almost exclusively. And while its slow, the required thinking and careful trade off considerations to avoid Zapp Biterigans is about as close to the soul-crushingly oppressive paranoia, tiny margin of error, and health damaging stress levels of a Death World play-through... without having to experience the soul-crushingly oppressive paranoia, tiny margin of error, and health damaging stress levels of a Death World play-through.