Power

Most buildings require electricity, or power, to run. Power is generated in generators and has to be supplied to your buildings via a power grid consisting of Power Lines and Power Poles. Power is measured in megawatts (MW).

Power grid
A power grid is a network of power-generating and power-consuming buildings connected through power lines and poles. A graph of total power production versus consumption can be viewed by activating any power pole or generator on that grid. If consumption ever exceeds production, the grid will overload and shut off, requiring manual reactivation at one of the connected generator of power pole. Before reactivating, it is recommended and sometimes necessary to either attach more power generators to the grid or remove power-consuming buildings, otherwise, the grid will simply overload again as soon as it's reactivated.

Power consumers
Most buildings require power to function and they are called power consumers. See individual building pages for their power requirement, measured in MW. Buildings in standby mode consume 0.1 MW, even if not producing anything.

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 depends on power consumption. At 50%, fuel will last twice as long as at 100% consumption. For example, if a total of 300MW is being generated by Coal Generators, but only 150MW is being consumed, Coal and Water will be consumed 50% slower in total (building more Generators will NOT cause any changes, instead, once power demand increases and not enough Coal or Water will be supplied, the extra generators will stop operating, possibly causing a power trip). This applies to all types of generators with the exception of Geo Thermal Generators, which will always produce at 100%, having priority over all other generators (see below for details).

Biomass Burner
Consumes various forms of organic matter to produce 30MW of power per generator. Up to 2 Biomass Burners are attached to the HUB, more can be built once the HUB is complete. Most harvested fuel items can be crafted into Biomass to increase their energy, and biomass can be further refined into Solid Biofuel.

Notes:
 * Biomass Burners must be fed manually and can therefore not run indefinitely without player interaction.
 * Biofuel has a lot of energy for early game but requires two crafting processes to acquire.

Coal Generator
Coal Generators boils Water by burning Coal to produce 75MW of power per generator.

Notes:
 * Coal has less energy per item and per stack than Biofuel but is much easier to acquire in bulk
 * Coal Generators have a conveyor and pipeline input, allowing them to be fully automated; it is the first fully automatable power source.

Fuel Generator
Fuel Generators consume Fuel to produce 150MW of power per generator.

Geo Thermal Generator


A Geo Thermal Generator can be built on a Geyser node to provide 200MW of power. It does not require any resource input to function. Geo Thermal Generators do not scale with power consumption and always produce 100% of power, which means that other generators only have to produce the difference between your total power consumption and what Geo Thermal Generators produce. This means, if the total power consumption is less than the total power generated by Geo Thermal Generators alone, no other generators will run and fuel resources for those generators will be conserved.

Nuclear Power Plant
Nuclear Power Plants consume Nuclear Fuel Rods and Water to generate 2500MW of power. It also produces Nuclear Waste that emits dangerous radiation and cannot be disposed of by normal means.

Clock speed
Overclocked/underclocked production buildings consume polynomially more/less power, while production speed increases/decreases linearly. Overclocking power generators increase their power output at a loss. Overclocking one to 200%, for example, will result in 170% of its original power output. Fuel consumption is still proportional to power consumption.