Solar power, a complaint...

1st Official Post

    I used to use wind power, but with the power system changes in IC2, that made it a bit nonviable (without a tremendous amount of work). The problem with wind power is that you need to transfer power a LONG way. It can be done, but this takes a lot of advanced stuff to do this efficiently.


    But that is ok. No more wind power. We got Solar power. I never much used them, but I can adapt. So I make solar arrays and all that and I am happy.


    So now I playing the current version of IC2, 1.337 and starting a new world. So I go to make some solar generators and guess what. Now they are expensive as hell. TWO Circuits? That is a lot of resources for a new world (to get a decent amount of them). OK... FINE... Ill just build half as many and take much longer to get my power systems. I do not like it, but OK. So now I make my smaller solar array and it is day time. Hmm. I am not getting any power. Why is this? Oh wait, another feature has been added. If it is raining, you get NO POWER. So now solar power much more expensive and doesn't work nearly as often due to the rain. The way weather works it can rain All day.


    I really must protest this. I do not like this. Please reconsider this. For rain, you can just reduce the efficiency a bit, maybe .75 EU or .5 EU per tick when it is raining.


    Id also ask that you just use one circuit for solar power too. It is already expensive enough with all the tin, iron, and redstone needed.


    I really like this mod, but I swear sometimes I think the motivation for some changes is almost vindictive. I just want to have fun and I do not want some hard core experience. Maybe you could put this as an option in a config file. My challenges come from building grand projects and IC2 and Buildcraft are simple tools to help me do so.

    Quote from Rick

    Ppl complained about solars being op and now they complain about solars being up. Will it ever end? I already told solars where fine they way they where but no they had to change it.

    Before solars were -right- powered, the other 'renewable' generators were under-powered (wind more so for variance/size of effect measurement zone) and nukes were -way- under-powered/inefficient. Now solars are arguably more expensive per energy than nukes (except nukes need glowstone dust; that's and ease of use once installed are the only positives to solars now).


    Now the generator/geo is more effective, which makes the nerfing to solars even /harsher/; Nukes are more powerful though, which makes the timer-gated reactors I explored in a recent nuke-eng thread far more viable.


    As for nukes; they've gone in the correct direction, but over-all power is now more-expensive than it was before. Base/geo gens are just a bit faster (meaning you need half of them); they aren't really more effective at producing power from fuel though.

    You are right. They were fine the way they were. It did take a lot of metal to make those solars. Sure when you got a bunch of auto miners going then you could pump them out. But before that, it took a large investment of metals to make them. If they just want us to use nukes, then remove most other energy generators. Id ask for more options as far as power, but they have enough choices in types, only they have all been nerfed.


    Originally you could use wind power. That was back when you just had one kind of cable, copper. You could easily make a extreme voltage converter and those lesser MFEs. You still had to build a very tall tower and place your generators up top and transferring the power down a LONG WAY using EV. Then you got it at the bottom and lost maybe 200 EU, but who cares? Then you easily convert it back to normal voltages.


    Then they screwed it all up in IC2. Now you have all these cable types and the cost in materials just to convert from LV to EV and back again is absolutely nuts. Did anyone think about that? Until they remedy that, Wind power is completely useless as a real source of power.


    There was water power. This idea seemed to be still-borned. You would think that it might be take into account a very large area for generation. IE: an ocean would act as a tidal generator. Or perhaps the velocity of water flowing over it, such as a tall waterfall. But no... This kind of power needs to be re-engineered.


    Then there was solar which did require a very large investment in materials because it only ran during the day, above ground and provided a little power. It was fine. If the hard core people thought it was far too much, then they could just not use solar. What is their motivation? The game isn't tough enough? Is that it? Then get a mod that introduces more aggressive monsters or something. Or just don't build solar panels.


    Geothermal is OK, It is my starting generator when I start a new world. However without some kind of automated lava generation system (not to mention it eats tin) it isn't useful for anything but a small scale operation. Tin is hard enough to get. Now if you could use copper in place of tin, it wouldn't be so bad, although you will still need to manually fill a bunch of lava cells.


    Nuclear: Very expensive and if you screw up, there is a giant crater where your base used to be. NO THANKS. You can keep it.


    I just want to explore the world and build neat things. I just want mods that help me do that. Please reconsider your changes to solar power and/or fix some of the other issues with the above mentioned power systems. Keep nuclear the way it is. Ill never use it. People who want danger and hard core stuff, they can play with nuclear.

    Sounds like you want the easy way out of a challenge.


    Seems the most "annoying" item required would be redstone. Dig down, bring ladders, you'll find some redstone, not that difficult.


    Tap some trees before you hunt redstone, they should have some more rubber ready for you to extract by the time you return to the surface.


    Nuclear isn't all that frightening/dangerous if you use a simple mark 1 setup. Essentially risk free.

    Quote from TheSilverHammer


    Originally you could use wind power. That was back when you just had one kind of cable, copper. You could easily make a extreme voltage converter and those lesser MFEs. You still had to build a very tall tower and place your generators up top and transferring the power down a LONG WAY using EV. Then you got it at the bottom and lost maybe 200 EU, but who cares? Then you easily convert it back to normal voltages.


    Then they screwed it all up in IC2. Now you have all these cable types and the cost in materials just to convert from LV to EV and back again is absolutely nuts. Did anyone think about that? Until they remedy that, Wind power is completely useless as a real source of power.


    What's so bad about the new system? Did you forget how utterly horrible the old system was? You had to do a bunch of complicated splits or you'd be wasting power left and right due to the half goes each split thing. I *love* the new system, it's not like stepping things up to EV is all that hard. As to wind: it's effectively unchanged since IC1. Build wind generators on top of the world connected to a MFE and step it up to HV then EV for transmission to the ground then back to HV to feed a MFSU


    Quote from _Tim_


    Nuclear isn't all that frightening/dangerous if you use a simple mark 1 setup. Essentially risk free.


    Yup! I've had a 35EU/t (now 70) 2 chamber reactor running with zero problems for quite a while now. The only problem i've had is what to do with the depleted uranium. (don't have a breeder, not sure if I want to go through the hassle)
    It's a bit annoying making everything for the initial setup but after that you only have to feed it more fuel.

    The problem with solar power is that once you have it set up it runs for ever... (even though it takes breaks every once in a while during night and rain)
    They are meant to be free energy and just like their real life counterparts, free energy comes at a hefty setup cost.


    The thing about expensive though is that once you reach a certain level (you have a diamond drill, some dynamite and iron ore is coming in faster than you can macerate it) the solar panels are dirt cheap compared to a nuke.
    Personally, i prefer plain old generators running of charcoal because they give me easy access to power and the power source is still renewable. And with any of the other two major mods (BC or RP2) you can automate the system.
    I am perfectly fine with automated tree farm fueled power generators because they take skill to implement.
    Solar panels on the other hand is just a matter of placing a few blocks and cables. There isn't much designing going on and then they just sit there, making power... each day just making power, never to be cared for ever again.
    I could just as well TMI in a bunch of MFSU's and lapo crystals and have the same effect in the end.

    If you wanted to increase the challenge of solar power, they went way overboard. Two cables were replaced with two circuits. That is a HUGE change. Then add on top of that, it has to be day time with perfect weather.


    While I do not want more challenge (I find my challenge from other sources), I can give you a much softer nerf to solar power.


    When you make a solar panel you need a generator. You know a generator that burns coal or other things... Solar power is more electronic then this, so for the sake of something slightly more realistic, drop this component from the blueprint. Replace it with a single circuit. Add a machine and a cable on one side and you have your new blueprint for a solar panel. IE: The bottom row is a machine, cable and circuit, the top is the same.


    The second, softer nerf. In real life, solar cells still operate during cloudy days (I worked at the florida solar energy center when I was younger). Yes they are not as efficient, but they do work quite well. So in this game when it is regular rain, they produce 0.5 EU / tick. If it is the thunder storm then you can say they drop to 0.25 or 0 EU.


    This is a much more reasonable nerf. I still think it is unneeded, but I could live with this.


    I still do not understand why people think it needed to be nerfed. So someone can build a giant solar array and get 1000s of EU. So what? Why do you care? How does it hurt you that someone else in another game is doing this? If you do not like it in your game, then don't build a giant solar array.

    I actually think it is completly impossible for you to totally balance all sources of power.


    As a note, The solar panel recipie was reverted back to how it was in IC1.


    Lets see, The other thing is that solar panels take up very little space in comparison to the other renewable generators, which could include generators, assuming you are using a cactus farm or similar.


    It is basically impossible, unless alblaka were to make power logic run secondly instread of once a tick, to have part of a EU be sent through a wire.

    It's easy to make solars output 0.5 EU/tick or any other arbitrary number. You just have it skip ticks.


    I don't think renewable was nerfed quite enough, and on my server I plan to make solar 0.75 EU/tick.

    Quote from TheSilverHammer

    While I do not want more challenge (I find my challenge from other sources), I can give you a much softer nerf to solar power.


    If you don't want a challenge making energy then why are you even bothering building generators? Just TMI your energy if you want to spend more time on other challenges?


    Quote from TheSilverHammer

    When you make a solar panel you need a generator. You know a generator that burns coal or other things... Solar power is more electronic then this, so for the sake of something slightly more realistic, drop this component from the blueprint. Replace it with a single circuit. Add a machine and a cable on one side and you have your new blueprint for a solar panel. IE: The bottom row is a machine, cable and circuit, the top is the same.


    The way i see it, drop the generator and the two circuits. In it's place put two tin cables and an advanced circuit. That would make sense to me as far as the recipe goes.


    Quote from TheSilverHammer

    The second, softer nerf. In real life, solar cells still operate during cloudy days (I worked at the florida solar energy center when I was younger). Yes they are not as efficient, but they do work quite well. So in this game when it is regular rain, they produce 0.5 EU / tick. If it is the thunder storm then you can say they drop to 0.25 or 0 EU.


    I don't mind solar panels producing power during rain or thunderstorms. Heck, they could even produce small amounts of energy in moonlight. (And MC should introduce lunar cycles IMHO)
    The problem i have with solar panels is (partly) this:



    That is the Olmedilla Park Solar Power Plant, Spain which is a 60 MW Solar power plant.


    vs this:



    which is the Didcot Power Station, UK. It produces 1958 MW.
    Given, i haven't included a picture of a coal pit but for the sake of simplicity, let's say they take the same amount of space.


    So, coal power produces 32 times more energy than solar power in real life per space consumed.
    In industrial craft, a generator produces 20 times more energy, but to run one generator non stop we would need (if we include the night downtime for solar power) 15 coal per minecraft day. We would of course be running it on charcoal so we need to use a furnace of some sort to burn logs into coal. Once again, for the sake of simplicity lets go with 2 coal to produce 15 coal so that's 17 coal (17 logs) that needs to be harvested each day to keep such a generator running non stop.
    In my experience, to meet demands you thus need at least 8 tree spots (with 2 tiles spacing in between then, using pinewood) for a total of 200 tiles consumed per generator. Then (since cutting trees each minecraft day is a true bore) you also need to set up an automated system that cuts them down and sends them to the furnaces, as well as replants them. This takes space AND energy. (unless you use redpower2's free work block breakers, which i don't because i don't like free energy)
    Not to mention trees grow tall, i think it is 12 tiles high?


    So in the case of solar panels, you can have 200 solar panels in that same space. Thus you get 200 active EU/t when it's sunny. (100 effective EU/t)
    No matter how you twist and turn that, solar power is producing more power than generators per space consumed. Sure they are expensive but once you have them set up you never need to touch them ever again and they take no time at all to set up if you compare it to the time it takes to set up an automated coal plant.


    So opposed to what you would expect from a real life situation (where burning fossils is WAAAAY more effective then catching sunlight), in IC² it's completely the other way around.
    Even if it's raining 1 day out of 5 (which isn't the average at all) you still get an effective 80 EU/t per day out of a solar park whereas you can only dream about that in a coal based generator automated farm.


    To make any sense then, solar panels should have it's output reduced to say 0.1 EU/t...!


    Quote from TheSilverHammer

    I still do not understand why people think it needed to be nerfed. So someone can build a giant solar array and get 1000s of EU. So what? Why do you care? How does it hurt you that someone else in another game is doing this? If you do not like it in your game, then don't build a giant solar array.


    It's called SMP, have you ever played it?
    If someone builds 1,000 solar panels the server will DIE under the CPU load. I don't mind people building 1,000 solar panels in SSP. They are free to use whatever they want (including TMI, WorldEdit and Equivalent Exchange) in SSP. (Even though cheating yourself doesn't make much sense now does it?)
    Back to the point then... Multiplayer! I can make a 1740 effective EU/t nuclear reactor. All i need to do is find 45 uranium ore every 2.7 hours (Unless i make a breeder too) as well as build A LOT of buckets and pipes and expensive machinery etc etc to make one. I would employ my designing skills every step of the way to achieve that goal and i wouldn't lag the server.


    Yet, someone else on the same server can make 1,000 solar panels (and thus reach >50% of my reactors output) using somewhat more iron in exchange for the more advanced materials. They lag the server for everybody and they never have to re-fill their solar panels. They can use the time saved to make other things happen. I bet that they will even be finished with their solar farm long before i finish my reactor if we started at the same time and had one half each of the world to ourselves.


    You still wonder why I think solar panels are OP and should be nerfed?


    On a side note, for SSP/SMP there should be config entries to determine how much energy each generator can produce. As well as the energy costs of all machines, this way if one generator or machine is OP/UP then it's simply a matter of altering the config entry for that specific generator/machine.

    It bears repeating that nerfing solar output won't mean that people build LESS of them.
    If the problem is server performance and lag, you want more efficiency, not less!

    I live in a desert... no rain over here, so my solars aren't nerfed in that regard (unless it's a thunderstorm, in which case they are, but that's fairly rare). It makes sense, doesn't it? No sunlight, no solar power, right?


    Still... the only reason people are/were yelling "OP! OP! NERF!" is because they either run an SMP server or play on one... just nerf them for SMP by providing config files. In all honesty, if they're worried about lag, I would suggest a config entry for removing solars from the game entirely. There, problem solved. :P

    The fundamental problem isn't Solaris, but the lack of good alternatives. That is why people choose solars. It is not like there are many other good choices, but Solars are just so uber they are picked all the time. Like I said, i started with Windpower and only used solars initially to recharge batteries (and that aspect of them has been broken / nerfed or was never ported to IC2). They no longer take stacks of batteries that can be auto-ejected into chests anymore.


    Anyway, if you want to "Fix" the whole situation, do this by looking at the power systems people DON'T use and make them competitive. This is what game designers do whenever they patch a game, such as WoW or RTS game and what not. They look at what ISN'T being used and try and buff it. It is a knee-jerk reaction to bring the nerf bat on what is being used instead of looking at why other things are not being used and fixing them.


    Ill take this challenge and "Fix" each alternate power system so that they are more attractive and will compete with Solar (old style, not this nerfed crap).


    Windpower:
    The problem with wind-power is that by its very nature you need LONG DISTANCE power transfers. You need to move your EU's through a very long cable which means a lot of power loss. If this problem were solved, Windpower would be a great choice.


    Problem 1: We need a way to convert LV to EV and back again cheaply. The current setup requires a lot of transformers to convert between the two as well a lot of highly lossy refined iron cable. Your best bet is the not even insulate it because that is a metric tun of rubber required to fully insulate it. You are also going to need a heck of a lot of this cable.


    Possible solution: Make a transformer between LV and EV. Try bronze cables (and fix the bronze formula to yeild 4 dust. How does 4 dusts turn into 2 dusts? If you wanted to somewhat accurate on how bronze was really made it would be 8 copper to 1 tin (actually its should be 19:1 ratio but you can't do that in minecraft)). The EV transfer cost should be cheaper, if we are trying to be realistic. After all in the real world we do use EV to transfer power precisely because it is far more efficient.


    Water Power:
    This has never been a good choice. It just produces far to little power.
    I purpose two new modes for this to make it a useful power option.


    Mode 1: Tidal Generator. In this mode It generates 0.001 EU for each still water block within a 100 block radius. This a shallow pond will not give much power, but if you are actually on an ocean where the water gets deep really fast, it will add up. I have no idea how many still water blocks would be in that volume so these numbers are a guess. This should produce a lot of power. The big draw-back is that you need to be near an ocean.


    Mode 2: Moving water. In a 1 block radius around it, it looks for moving water. It traces that water to its source and the delta in height from the source block to it represents the Power P in the water. For each block around it, the power can be P x 0.01. So a 64 height water fall will give you .64EU. With 4 faces covered it would be 2.56 EU. If you count the corners that could be 5.12 EU. If you stack the generators you might subtract 1 power from all of them for each generator in the stack.


    Geo Thermal generator:
    This is almost fine, but a small change is needed. It should eject empty cells into a box next to it to recover the empty cells.


    Filling those cells should be automated although this is a finite resource because it requires lava source blocks. Pumps should operate without a miner and you should run a pipe to a lake. It should drain the entire lake filling lava cells. It should not require much power, but can be partnered with a generator (geo thermal would be a good choice). It should draw from the farthest connected source lava block to the closest. It would be even more ideal if it would draw empty cells from a chest and eject full cells into the same chest.



    With the above changes, the lure of solars isn't so strong.

    wind gen makes so much more energy than solars it will more than compensate the the energy loss. Even with a copper cable. Want less loss? Just place some batboxes then and voila less loss + more storage.


    My suggestion:
    Double solar output in deserts and keep price as it is. Why? Because its realistic and solars need a buff.


    Btw that tidal gen is op :). Lets say you got a nice ocean with 100x100x20 water blocks. Thats 200000 water blocks meaning it will produce 200 eu/tick...I think something like 30-40 eu/tick would be better. It needs to be quite expensive also.

    Quote from TheSilverHammer


    Windpower:
    The problem with wind-power is that by its very nature you need LONG DISTANCE power transfers. You need to move your EU's through a very long cable which means a lot of power loss. If this problem were solved, Windpower would be a great choice.


    Problem 1: We need a way to convert LV to EV and back again cheaply. The current setup requires a lot of transformers to convert between the two as well a lot of highly lossy refined iron cable. Your best bet is the not even insulate it because that is a metric tun of rubber required to fully insulate it. You are also going to need a heck of a lot of this cable.


    Possible solution: Make a transformer between LV and EV. Try bronze cables (and fix the bronze formula to yeild 4 dust. How does 4 dusts turn into 2 dusts? If you wanted to somewhat accurate on how bronze was really made it would be 8 copper to 1 tin (actually its should be 19:1 ratio but you can't do that in minecraft)). The EV transfer cost should be cheaper, if we are trying to be realistic. After all in the real world we do use EV to transfer power precisely because it is far more efficient.


    Then you really haven't done the math then. Transferring power via EV from the top of the world to the "ground level" is something on the order of 95% (or higher) efficient. I wouldn't call that "highly lossy" as that's what that cable was intended for. I also wouldn't call ~40-50 pieces "a lot" and that isn't really a "metric ton" of rubber. In my IC2 game i've usually got that much sitting around waiting to be used. I've also used *far* more than ~40-50 pieces of glass fibre cable for just LV and MV stuff and that's *far* more expensive than EV cable.
    also: *two* transformers is "a lot"? HV transformers are pretty cheap compared to the lots of "repeaters" method and you only need two. one to send the EV and another to receive it.

    The numbers for the tidal were a guess. Yes if its something ridiculous it will have to be adjusted. Whatever the end result is, it should produce good power considering it is geographically limited in its application. The point is that a lake or pond should not provide much power, where as an ocean would.


    Yes the wind generator itself makes good power. That isn't the problem. However you want it near the top of the world right? So lets say it needs to travel 64 units. Each packet of power between 1 and 4 will quickly disappear due to EU loss. The only way to prevent it to be loss is to step up the power. That is the problem, not the generator itself. Its the distance from the generators to wherever you are going to use the power. Glass cables would be ideal, but that would require a lot of diamonds. Even if we could turn charcole into coal dust, that is a lot of trees. Currently with the few diamonds I have, I have other uses for them. I do wonder if the wind generators still have the feature from the original IC. That is, when there was a storm, they generated crazy amounts of power.

    Just some things that bothered me here...


    First off, a radius of 100 (if using a sphere) means you get 4,188,790 blocks... I doubt ANYONE want's their MC to check for water in such a large area!
    If that radius is used in a traditional Minecraft way then that's 8,000,000 blocks... Yeah, have fun placing those tidal generators! Wait for up to 10 minutes for each placement.
    Even if you actually meant 100x100x100 it's still 523,598 blocks (in a sphere) and 1,000,000 in a cube which still is FAR too much and then solar power would no longer be the top lag inducing generator.


    I see your point with the idea but you need to stick to reasonable numbers. Even a 5x5x5 cube (125 blocks) is quite costly if it needs to check those blocks repeatedly. Which it does since MC doesn't have (AFAIK) a way to subscribe to a block and even if you can subscribe, just consider the impacts involved if anything changes within that area. Reactors have a 5x5x5 cube for evaporating water, that is easy since it merely does a search and replace when the temperature is greater than the threshold. And reactors have a 3x3x3 cube for external air/water cooling which is a total of 27 blocks. (far cheaper than 125)


    OK, enough about that since it was just an arbitrary number but that number was so large it makes me question the whole post...


    Secondly, if you buff everything BUT the solar panels then you might as well save you the trouble and simply nerf the solar panels...


    ...


    And about solar panel nerfs just making people build more of them on servers... That is true to some extent. You see, people balance resources for setup against the effectiveness of the solution and at a certain point they are going to be using solar power for the applications it's most suited for. If a solar panel is powerful enough to power some street lighting then they will be used for that. If they are powerful enough to charge a few batteries they will be used for that. It's when they are powerful enough to run X number of macerators, furnaces, compressors and even mass fabricators that they become OP and problematic for servers.


    There simply isn't enough diversity in machinery and generators to make solar fit in nicely. And further more, a solar park shouldn't be made up of that many cables and stuff as it bogs the game down, both SSP and SMP. Why not simply make them like a machine. Place the core and feed it with panels (an item, not a block) and the core extends itself depending on available space and number of resources available (up to 64x64 tiles wide) and when it is fully extended it will generate, for example, 60 EU/t or somewhere in that region.
    Then it's a single block that does ONE calculation and sends the power down a single cable. Lag issue solved.
    The extension is merely a single model that scales up with a tiled texture that is drawn in a single call. (The way spacetoads quarries are drawn)