Production of Electricity

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lorddrakenwode
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Re: Production of Electricity

Post by lorddrakenwode »

My first guess is that your minister is deciding that it's cheaper to import the electricity than produce it domestically. What is the production price and market price for electric power?
Cutlass
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Re: Production of Electricity

Post by Cutlass »

Uranium is a valuable commodity. Your production minister will cheerfully sell any and all uranium that you produce in excess of what you are using. Unfortunately the production minister is not very good at forecasting future uranium demand. So when a new nuclear power plant comes on line the uranium that you were producing in excess of previous demand (which could have gone to the new power plant) is not available to fuel the plant as it has been sold. It normally takes the production minister some time to realize that he has to reduce the amount of uranium he's selling in order to fuel the new power plant.

One of the problems with figuring out electrical production costs is that they seem to vary from region to region. Another headache is that when one is trying to figure out the production costs for a power plant that uses fuel, one also has to figure out how much fuel is required, how many facilities one needs to produce the fuel for one power plant, the prorated maintenance costs for the fuel facilities as well as the production cost of the fuel. By the time one has finished one has usually covered an entire sheet of paper with mathematical chicken scratch that may or may not turn out to have been a reasonable analysis.

With those caveats in mind, here are some figures I came up with that show how many MWh of electricity one can produce for a cost of $1M invested in various different plant types (+ fuel production facilities where needed):

Hydroelectric Plant 41,224 MWh/$1M
Advanced Solar 29,396 MWh/$1M
Nuclear Plant 29,045 MWh/$1M
Power-Other (*) 18,638 MWh/$1M
Coal Plant 15,515 MWh/$1M
Petrol Plant 2,761 MWh/$1M

(*) The figures for Power-Other are for the baseline plants with no technologies available that would increase their production.

Power production equivalencies: 1 nuclear power plant (8,760,001 MWh) = 2 coal plants (4,380,000 MWh each) = 2.5 Hydroelectric plants (3,504,000 MWh each) = 4 Petrol Plants (2,190,000 MWh each) = 5 Power-Other plants (1,752,000 MWh each)

Advanced Solar Power plants are equivalent to coal plants in terms of the amount of power they produce.

While I don't have the figures available on the later game power technologies, IIRC Fusion power plants coupled with cold fusion technology gives you the most economical power production possible.

******************************

Added in a later edit:

Using the latest figures from update 7 for two different regions to demonstrate that figures can vary quite a bit from region to region.

For the Congo Democratic Republic a Power-Other facility producing 1,752,000 MWh per year has an annual maintenance cost of $41M. This gives it a ratio of 42,732MWh/$1M for comparison and beats out hydroelectric power for cost effectiveness.

For Quebec, the exact same Power-Other plant with an output of 1,752,000 MWh per year has an annual maintenance cost of $120M. This gives it a ratio of 14,600MWh/$1M making it less cost effective than a coal plant.

Why the massive difference in maintenance costs between the two regions? I'm not sure, and one of the designers would have to jump in to say exactly what the reasons were. However, two reasons that suggest themselves to me are:

(1) Differences in labor costs between the two regions. Workers in Quebec get paid a lot more than workers in the Congo Democratic Republic. So, to the extent that wages (as reflected in the GDP/C figures) are factored in to maintenance costs than anything which is even remotely "labor intensive" is going to be less cost effective the higher the regional wages are.

(2) The Congo Democratic Republic is almost on the equator, whereas Quebec is much farther north. It is possible that the designers may have fudged the maintenance costs to make Power-Other (largely conventional solar) much more effective in a tropical region than in a region which is a lot closer to one of the poles and gets less daylight on average.

Regardless, the bottom line is that if you want to make sure you are getting the most cost effective power plants possible for your region, you are going to have to take the time to sit down and crunch the numbers for yourself, as any figures that you get are guaranteed to differ somewhat from mine.
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xort
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Re: Production of Electricity

Post by xort »

I'm going to copy what I'v writen before;

A cheat sheet version, if it doesn't use fuel, it costs $189/MW at 200% infrastucture. If it does use fuel it's $189/MW+ the cost of fuel per MW. So you need to find the best point of return for your own investment goals and cost needs. Coal is cheaper to get up and going but costs more to run than nuclear but less tha Oil. Overall of the no fuel power plants Advanced Solar is the best in terms of building cost/MW. But it can be limited by hexs in your loyal areas (which incress production), in which case I think Fusion is the best if you are pressed for space, not made out of money and can't build the AM and DM power plants yet.

The maintance cost is a very tiny cost given how much is produced each day, I would suggest ignoring it.

Other, solar, advanced solar, hydro, fusion all cost 189/MW at 200% infrastructure.

I haven't looked at DM or AM production but I can't see it be less than the other fuelless power.

Fission is almost the same cost as non fuel production. $191/MW at 200% inf, with $95 urainium.
Coal is about $220 with $85 coal.
Oil-power is $320~ with $138 oil.

Not to kick Cutless, but with an other plant making 1,752,000 MW/Year the production cost of power is $331,128,000 + maintance. However, an upgraded plant make 14,000MW/day in loyal high supply hexes. Or 5,110,000 MW/Year = $965,790,000 + maintance of $140M.
Take a coal plant if it made the very same power output, and you have coal at $85/ton it's annual cost is $1,124,200,000 + maintance.
Advanced solar produces 33,000MW/day and costs $165M a year. Or 2,276,505,000 + 165M

Build Adavnced Solar.
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Re: Production of Electricity

Post by GIJoe597 »

Cold Fusion, all you will ever need :)
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NephilimNexus
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Re: Production of Electricity

Post by NephilimNexus »

I know everyone is in love with Cold Fusion, but have you ever really tried getting there without any kind of cheats? It's tech level 132. I've got a game right now as Michigan and, having taken over half the former USA as well as China & Japan, we now have 17 research facilities, the largest population on earth, we're #1 in the world for technology rating and we've only just finished researching basic Fusion power technology as of May of 2029. The ETA on cold fusion is another 500+ days, so we're looking at 2031 at the earliest.

Meanwhile, Advanced Solar requires only Sterling Engines technology as a prerequisite, something that most developed countries (see above) can have finished within two years at most - which I did. So yes, I'm just now building my first fusion plants, but most of my power supply is still Advanced Solar & Hydroelectric and has been for many, many in game years, now. I feel no compulsion to go pulling them all down, either.

For a poor or less developed power, the difference between Cold Fusion & Advanced Solar technology grows even more. Someplace like Cuba may be able to research, buy or steal Advanced Solar within, oh, four or five years from game start. Cold Fusion? Please, it would be the 22nd century before they get that far unless they take over the entire USA beforehand.

It's like NanoManufactuing - sure it far superior than the previous facility, but at tech level 138 it is a long way off for anybody who isn't using cheats of some kind. Again, in the above game I'm probably not even going to have all the prerequisite techs for that one until 2035 at the earliest, even if I completely focus on it. Even with a dozen research facilities running at once there is only so much than can be done. If a single technology is bottlenecking you for a year long development schedule then no amount of extra facilities is going to speed that up. You can only diversify, not accelerate (except through research efficiency and that gets bank-breaking expensive past the 100% mark).

So yes, Cold Fusion is awesome if you're either using cheats or willing to sit in front of your computer on a single game for two weeks of real time. For the rest of us, Advanced Solar works just fine & can usually be acquired before we fall asleep on your keyboard.
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Re: Production of Electricity

Post by GIJoe597 »

I use Cold Fusion every game and never used any cheats. As far as time is concerned, it takes what it takes. /shrugs

Maybe the fact that I can do other things on other computers while the game is running helps. I hardly notice the time since I am actively engaged.

I am currently playing a game as the least teched country in the world and I will eventually build Cold Fusion even though it is Jan 2036 and I am only at tech level 83. :)
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sirveri
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Re: Production of Electricity

Post by sirveri »

I need to re-run my analysis for GC, I think I ran it while we were on an older version, and I might need to re-evaluate my calculations. I need to relearn how I did the first one actually, since the technique was sound.
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BigWolf
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Re: Production of Electricity

Post by BigWolf »

When I looked into a couple of months ago (abeit not as in-depth as Sirveri normally does)
I found it like
(Worst to best)
Other
Adv. Solar
Hydro
Petrol
Coal
Nuclear
Anti-Matter
Dark Energy
Cold Fusion

Petrol, Coal and Nuclear will vary based on resource price, but the others will only vary on labour wages (GDP)
This doesn't take into account maintenance, only the amounts generated with all techs

More in-depth would look at construction cost and maintenance (plus maybe days to build)
The rest should be the same if they were built and running along side each other
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sirveri
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Re: Production of Electricity

Post by sirveri »

BigWolf wrote:When I looked into a couple of months ago (abeit not as in-depth as Sirveri normally does)

Petrol, Coal and Nuclear will vary based on resource price, but the others will only vary on labour wages (GDP)
This doesn't take into account maintenance, only the amounts generated with all techs

More in-depth would look at construction cost and maintenance (plus maybe days to build)
The rest should be the same if they were built and running along side each other
The way I did my calculation was:
$/MWh = (Base cost ($) + IG$ + (RC))/MWh
IG$ = Industrial Goods * Base $/Industrial Good
RC = MWh * Resource/MWh * $/Resource

Numbers for resources (usage and base cost) can be found in the base file.
Another issue is the research output modifiers which will skew the results.

A note about maintenance costs, they're pointless to count. This is because maintenance costs are based off of the total cost of the power station.
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georgios
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Re: Production of Electricity

Post by georgios »

wmbasecost - wmfinalcost

many products can produced by more than one methods, and every method has different wmfinalcost. But wm price is calculated always based in the given wmfinalcost regardless the production method.

Sometimes all regions have higher production price than the wm. It seems that wm buys in high price and sells cheaper.

It seems that wm don't follows production costs of exporting countries.
galin56
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Re: Production of Electricity

Post by galin56 »

I'm new in that game. I'm just started with Liberia. The economy growth really fast. For one year and a half from GDP/c 1000$ and maybe was 80% unemployment, I reached 5200$ GDP/c and 1,5% unemployment. It is pretty unrealistic. Anyway, the topic is other. The economy has shortage of electricity now, and I start to build Power-Other, because they don't have neither oil, or hydro slot, or coal, or uranium. My question is following: because the whole region is poor, and now my state is most developed in the region, how my minister buy electricity for demands? You can't buy electricity from USA for example(wiring grid is needed). You can buy electricity only from neighbor countries (I think so). My suggestion for developers for later games is electricity to be basic for the development, and you to can sell it or buy it only from nations in defined perimeter. And one general purpose - more statistics, for example how much workers work there, average salaries, cost of raw materials, profit and so on. Traffic - demand for traffic between two cities, demand for highways, rails, profit after building them for economy, cities to have demands for theaters, stadiums, subways, etc. To can see private sector, what produce it and etc. already was mentioned cons goods and ind goods is very general, to have a parliament, mayor for cities, more cities on the map.....
GIJoe597
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Re: Production of Electricity

Post by GIJoe597 »

There is a thread around here that discusses storing and selling electricity. A couple of years ago, this was brought up Balthagor linked an example of sotring energy.. you may be able to find this thread. Please keep in mind the game is set in the FUTURE, :).
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galin56
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Re: Production of Electricity

Post by galin56 »

Yes, the game is in the future. May be in the future will be discovered way to storing the electricity with large batteries or something else, but I really doubtful about that to discover a way to transport the electricity through the ocean for example, but never mind. For the topic. I find out that if you small country without tehnologies, money and enough electricity only way to meet your demands is coal. Even if you don't have coal mine, the coal is cheap raw material for electricity and the electricity from coal is very profitable. So if any new player read this topic and he is unsure about what kind of electric factory to choose - coal is the answer and the only way for poor countries in the begining.
georgios
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Re: Production of Electricity

Post by georgios »

Electricity is stored in dams. Unsold power moves pumps that pump water to a higher level. When we need back the stored energy we release the water and it generates power again.

International power thade is not need to be physical. Sometimes the traders buy and sell financial products. So if Liberia buys electricity from US a US based company sells electricity that is produced in or near Liberia. The game does not inform us where are stored the reserves of the traded products. I am sure that every region holds wharehouses in every other region to store there products that are circulating. It is impossible to collect all imports at the capital and in the same day to export the same goods to the edge of the earth.

My latest opinion (for SRU) is that to replace electricity with water (that is excluded from SRU). Electricity production can be incorporated in industrial goods production. This makes all electricity plants useless and the discussion about what is more effective ends. Dams now produce drinking water instead of power and fuel for power plants becomes input for industry or is consumed directly by population.

I came to this opinion because there are not statistics for global electricity cost, but we know that drinking water is 1% of world GDP. Electricity generation is an unknown part of worlds industry GDP share.
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