Do solar panels still generate 1 EU/tick during daylight, and are the power usage values for macerators/efurnances still the same as the wiki in IC2Exp 1.10.2?

1st Official Post

    I'm running IC2 build #209 for 1.10.2


    I'm extremely confused about the power generation compared to "classic" IC2.

    I have 16 solar panels.

    They're conncted, via insulated tin cable (on the sides or bottom) to an MFE.


    If they each generate 1 EU/tick during daylight, and there are 20 ticks in a second, I should be getting ~320 EU/second into my MFE.


    But it is absolutely not filling up that fast.


    Beyond that, a macerator draws 2 EU/tick and a furnace 3 EU/tick. So with 2 of each I should be drawing about 10 EU/tick out of my 16 EU/tick total.


    Yet my solar panels cannot even come close to meeting demand.


    What the heck is going on? Is the wiki not up to date on the values? Is the power system broken in the builds I've been using?


    Thanks for any help. :(


    The wiki is rarely kept up to date from what I've seen. The tooltips are a more reliable source of this kind of detail (when available). Checking in-game, I see the solar panel does not list the power generation, but I think it's still 1 EU/t during daylight. However, the problem might be with the cables - tin cables now have 0.2 EU/block loss, so the solar panels that are 3 blocks or more away barely contribute anything, and at 5 or more blocks away, their contribution drops all the way to zero. At least that's what one would expect based on the numbers.


    I did some experimentation in creative mode, and determined that 10 insulated tin cables between a solar panel and a batbox still allows a trickle of power, but 11 cables and no power gets through. I thought maybe this meant that the solar panel was now 2 EU/t during daytime, but the EU reader says it's 1 EU/t max. Looking closer, I notice that both the insulated and uninsulated cables list 0.20 EU/block loss, which is unlikely to be correct.


    Aside from addons like compact solars or advanced solars (which both have 1.10.2 versions, though the latter is a remake by a different author iirc), I think the best way to reduce loss from solar panels is to buffer the energy in transformers (step-up mode) or energy storage blocks directly adjacent to the solar panels. Using insulated tin cables from the solar panels results in 10% energy lost per block traveled, while even just using a batbox to output pulses of 32 EU through insulated tin cables reduces this to 0.3%, and stepping up to MV and insulated copper cables (pulses of 128 EU) makes it about 0.08%.

    On top of that Player has decided to do some more bullshit and changing the EnergyNet again.

    Basically loss will be now applied instantly since build 209.
    That means you lose per Block now energy and not per Cable Combination that equal to 1EU...


    Have fun Exp Players. I am sorry for you guys...

    • Official Post

    The cables drop 0.2 EU per block, solars emit only 1 EU packets. That's 20% loss per cable. To mitigate that you want to get to a bigger packet size as soon as possible.


    solars.png


    There's currently 2 economic options for good efficiency:

    - 5 solars feeding an adjacent Batbox, then tin cable: 32 EU Batbox output, 0.2 EU loss per cable = 0.625% loss per cable (right side in the picture)

    - 5 solars feeding a LV Transformer with up-transforming setting, then copper cable: 128 EU Transformer output, 0.2 EU loss per cable = 0.156% loss per cable (left side in the picture)


    Previously you'd have used ULV cable specifically designed for this kind of setup, which doesn't exist anymore, or relied on any loss being rounded down.

    Quote from Player

    The cables drop 0.2 EU per block, solars emit only 1 EU packets. That's 20% loss per cable. To mitigate that you want to get to a bigger packet size as soon as possible.

    :( Empirical testing does not match tooltip claims. If it dropped 0.2 EU per block, then it would stop after 4-5 cables as I originally predicted. However, with IC2 build 209 and the latest Forge, I can get it to run through 9 tin cables (either insulated or uninsulated; I hadn't actually tried the uninsulated before, I expected it to have worse losses as well as shocking nearby entities - running it through 10 was with an older Forge build). The EU-reader on the batbox shows an average EU in wavering around 100 mEU/t, though a max of 198. Seems to me the loss is more like 0.09 EU/block (or 0.10 if you don't count the batbox as part of the distance)