RimWorld

RimWorld

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Alternative Power Solutions
   
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Mod, 1.3
File Size
Posted
Updated
11.285 MB
31 Aug, 2021 @ 5:16am
8 May, 2022 @ 8:58am
3 Change Notes ( view )

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Alternative Power Solutions

Description
One of the corner stones of power generation is boiling water to turn a turbine yet until this moment none of the power mods out there have taken advantage of Dubs Bad Hygiene to make those turbines spin. Well let me be the first.

This mod adds four new water dependent ways to generate your power, more powerful than vanilla generators but each with their drawbacks.

The first of the four are offshore wind turbines, they ignore everything I just said by not requiring DBH and not being new.
Anyway these are bigger, costlier, more powerful wind turbines which can only be built on deep ocean water and if you have Expanded Materials - Plastics installed they'll use plastic polymer in their recipe. Think of them as a potentially more powerful yet unreliable alternative to vanilla expanded's tidal generator.

The second new generator is the Coal fired power plant. At 3500W this thing is more powerful than coal generators from other mods but unlike those, if you fail to provide water, it fails to provide power.

The third is the EGS or Enhanced Geothermal System. This plant requires more research than others but once ready is cheap to build and provides constant free energy. In real terms it drills a hole deep into the planets crust then pumps water in to retrieve as steam. Consider it your supercharged geothermal plant you can build anywhere. The drawback? Insectoids hate drilling.

The fourth and most powerful plant is the Concentrated Solar Power Station. It takes a lot of space, water, resources and time to build but this massive array of mirrors is worth it. Unlike solar panels this generates power from the Sun's heat not its light and that means when the sun goes down this will keep generating power several hours into the night as the water slowly cools. (Real versions are better served by molten salt over water but there's no framework for that so water it is.) Keep your defences ready, this fragile structure is the definition of all your eggs in one basket.
Also if you're using glass+lights some of the steel cost will be replaced by glass.

If you feel yourself short on water give my desalination plant a try:
https://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2590011230

As an extra something if you're using Vanilla Expanded - Power your nuclear power plant now requires water and a lot of it so keep the pumps in working order if you don't want to find graphite on the roof.

Math time:

Water generation assuming perfect coverage
Well - 150 L/ph
Deep Well - 400 L/ph
Desalination Plant - 625 L/ph

(OUTDATED COSTS SEE THE UPDATE BELOW)
Water Cost
Coal power plant - 62.5 L/ph
Enhanced Geothermal - 125 L/ph
Concentrated Solar - 250 L/ph
Nuclear Power plant - 500 L/ph

Credit goes to Krazy for the art and Taranchuk for the code.

{2022 Update}
I've increased the power on the geothermal plant and coal plants and massively reduced the water drain on all power plants. That measurement up there is flawed in design, it assumes the player will have access to multiple deep wells or be based on the shoreline. If you're building a base in an arid biome my previous numbers would have made these plants worthless. They're now balanced against my Helixien additions mod which itself is balanced around the helixien generators from Vanilla Expanded Power. You'll be able to field multiple power plants without starving yourself of water and this gives me more wiggle room to make other water requiring machines in future.
39 Comments
Thundercraft 22 Dec, 2022 @ 8:14am 
Updated (continued) version for 1.4:

Alternative Power Solutions(continued no turbine no problem!)
https://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2904358909
Mr_Awesome88 15 Dec, 2022 @ 7:20pm 
1.4? one of my fav power mods.
Goisa 21 Nov, 2022 @ 11:42am 
1.4?)
Luinithil 16 Sep, 2022 @ 3:58am 
Think there's an issue with the way you set up patching for the VPE nuclear plant: I'm not using it in my current modlist but it still tries to patch what isn't there...
[Alternative Power Solutions] Patch operation Verse.PatchOperationSequence(count=1, lastFailedOperation=Verse.PatchOperationAdd(/Defs/ThingDef[defName = "VPE_NuclearGenerator"]/comps)) failed
Huglog here https://gist.github.com/ec3597157413ba3e08d704808d27041e
ScaryRabbit 28 Jul, 2022 @ 9:22pm 
So, can I use this mod with the lite version of expanded materials?
Scorpio 24 May, 2022 @ 9:22am 
please turn off logging thanks
Holgast 8 May, 2022 @ 6:51pm 
Just making ultra sure it's okay with you! :) thanks anyway
OptimusPrimordial  [author] 8 May, 2022 @ 6:14am 
Steam didn't notify me your post but yeah, you don't need to ask do whatever you want to these mods.
Holgast 24 Apr, 2022 @ 1:10am 
Hey again, OP. I've always wanted a large solar power array like this one. Do I have permission to make a fork version which removes DBH dependency, and has alt recipes?
OptimusPrimordial  [author] 26 Feb, 2022 @ 11:16pm 
The plants require EMM metals to build, if you also switch those recipes with your patch then it'd be able to run without EMM.