Power

Most buildings require electricity, or power, to function. Power is produced in power generators (see below) and consumed by buildings. Power is transferred via Power Lines, Power Poles, or Train Stations and Railways. Power is measured in megawatts (MW).

Note: In the UI of some buildings, the unit of power is incorrectly displayed as MWh, which is a typo; the displayed value is still MW.

Power grid
A power grid is a network consisting of power-generating and power-consuming buildings connected through Power Lines, Power Poles, Train Stations, and Railways. A graph of total power capacity, power production, and power consumption can be viewed by interacting with any Power Pole, generator, or Train Station on that grid.

Power trip
If power consumption ever exceeds production, the power grid will trip. All connected power generators and power consumers in that grid will stop working. The sound effect of the trip can be heard from any part of the map, regardless of the distance between the tripped devices and the engineer.

The engineer can reset the circuit breaker by interacting at any of the connected power generators or Power Poles. In the UI, pull down the lever (refer to the image below) to restore the power. Before resetting, it is advised to either attach more power generators to the grid or temporarily remove power cables to some of the areas of the factory, otherwise, the power grid will simply overload again as soon as it is reactivated.

A power trip may also allow hostile creatures to respawn.

Power consumers

 * Most buildings require power to function. They are called power consumers. See individual building pages for their power requirement, measured in MW.
 * Each building in standby mode (whether the engineer flipped the standby switch, or if the building is not functioning due to a logistic issue) consumes 0.1 MW.
 * Indicator Lights show whether a building is operating and consuming power or not.

Power generators
Power generators convert fuels into power. Each type of generator building has its own set of fuel item types and power output.

Fuel consumption rate
Fuel consumption depends on power consumption. At 50% power usage, fuel will last twice as long. For example, if 75 MW is being generated by Coal Generators, but only 37.5 MW is being consumed, Coal and Water will be consumed at a 50% rate. Building more generators will change nothing. Instead, once power consumption is increased and not enough Coal and/or Water are being supplied, the extra generators will stop operating, possibly causing a power trip. This applies to all types of generators except for Geothermal Generators, which always produce Power at 100%, and have priority over all other generators.

Type of generators
There are several types of power generators: Click on their respective link to learn more about them.

Clock speed
Overclocking is unlocked at the M.A.M.. The clock speed of buildings can be adjusted by interacting with it and adjusting the slider. are required to increase the clock speed beyond 100%, up to 250% maximum.

Underclocking can be done freely once overclocking has been researched and costs no Power Shards. See main article: Clock Speed''

Power consumer

 * Power consumers work at the rate of user-defined clock speed. For example, a Constructor works twice as fast when its clock speed is set to 200%.
 * It is always less power efficient when a building is overclocked.
 * In the above example, its power consumption will be greater than 2x the usual power consumption. This also means a building at 200% consumes more power than 2 equal buildings each operating at 100%.
 * On the other hand, underclock a building saves power.
 * Two constructors each working at 50% use less power compared to 1 Constructor working at 100%.
 * However, the footprint of the factory will be larger.

Power generator

 * Power generators overclock differently from power consumers. However, their fuel consumption rate is always proportional to the power production of the building. Hence, overclocking a power generator will not increase fuel efficiency.
 * For example, you cannot overclock/underclock a Coal Generator to increase the efficiency of each piece of Coal.

Trivia

 * When interacting with any power building with a Power graph displayed, and if clicking on the graph for 6 times, the Power graph will first become glitched followed by a warning indicating that you are abusing the FICSIT property. The warning will go away if you close and re-open the Power graph.


 * The maximum sustainable fully-automated power production is 1932.53 GW if all resources that can be are used on power.
 * A maximum of 1,800 Uranium per minute can be extracted. Using the Infused Uranium Cell and Nuclear Fuel Unit alternate recipes, this can fuel a maximum of 472.5 Nuclear Power Plants at 2500 MW each, for a total of 1,181.25 GW of power.
 * A maximum of 7,500 Crude Oil per minute can be extracted. Using the Heavy Oil Residue, Diluted Packaged Fuel, Compacted Coal, and Turbofuel alternate recipes, this can fuel a maximum of 3703.7 Fuel Generators at 150 MW each, for a total of 555.56 GW of power.
 * Note: Due to balancing changes and the introduction of MK2 pipes in Patch 0.3.6 this is no longer correct.
 * A total of 9900 Crude Oil per minute can be extracted, 10 Impure nodes at 250% give 150 each, 12 normal for 300 each, and 8 pure for 600 each.
 * The limitation on Turbofuel is now Sulfur. If ALL 6840 Sulfur was used, a total of 8550 Turbofuel per minute can be made with an additional 16140 fuel left over. This gives 1900 generators on Turbofuel and 1076 on fuel, for a total of 2976 Generators at 150MW each, Producing a total of 446.4GW of power.
 * A maximum of 30,900 Coal per minute can be extracted. A maximum of 6840 Sulfur per minute can be extracted and combined with an equal amount of Coal to make Compacted Coal, which burns approximately twice as long as Coal.  6840 Compacted Coal per minute can fuel a maximum of 957.6 Coal Generators, and the remaining 24,060 Coal per minute can fuel a maximum of 1604 Coal Generators, for a total of 2561.6 Coal Generators at 75 MW each, or 192.12 GW of power.
 * There are a total of 18 valid geysers for Geothermal Generators, at 200 MW each, for a total of 3.6 GW of power.
 * Note that reaching this requires consuming 100% of available coal, sulfur, and oil on the map purely for power, and thus is not a practical setup.
 * This power production is 61.1% nuclear, 28.7% fuel, 9.9% coal, and 0.19% geothermal.