Power Generation: Difference between revisions

Oil is the most common fuel used LV-HV. It's available mid-LV, and is viable until LuV for power generation and useful for other resources far beyond that. Oil itself is not recommended to be used as a fuel, instead it must be refined. The four main fuels obtained from oil, in order of complexity, are light fuel, diesel, cetane-boosted diesel, and high-octane gasoline. Each one is more oil-efficient, complex, and a higher tier than the last. Oil can also be distilled into various useful chemicals- ethylene for polyethylene, a plastic, toulene for explosives, etc. , but this guide is focusing on energy production.

Tiers of Fuel:

* Light fuel is available at LV as a direct product of oil desulfurization.

* Diesel is available at MV from mixing light fuel and heavy fuel in a 5:1 ratio.

* CBD (cetane boosted diesel) is available at HV from mixing diesel with tetranitromethane (made using nitric acid and ethenone in a chemical reactor).

* HOG (high-octane gasoline) is available at HV in a large chemical reactor with EV power from an extremely complex set of recipes (regular gasoline can be made at HV but isn't worth using). It is not a direct upgrade from CBD, rather it gets it's own processing chain.

Each tier is more complex than the last, but more oil-efficient. Light fuel is still a viable source of power even at EV, but at that point making cetane-boosted diesel will triple your power output per cell.

CBD can be used until LuV, but a significant amount of large combustion engines need to be built to use CBD beyond IV. Note that only HOG can be burned in the ECE (extreme combustion engine, the IV multiblock combustion generator that produces 1A of LuV when boosted), which allows oil to be used until late LuV/early ZPM.

Benzene is another renewable fuel, made from charcoal and wood tar in a pyrolyse oven and later in a ICO (Industrial Coke Oven). It is fairly simple to make, but requires several fluid extractors to run at max speed. It is first available at MV, requiring an MV distillery to obtain it from Wood Tar, and it gets significantly stronger in EV when ICO and multiblock turbines become avaliable. Benzene is viable until LuV+ (you can even use it all the way to UHV if you spam enough XL turbines).

The first step is creating Wood Tar and Charcoal from wood. Then send all the outgoing Charcoal to Fluid Extractors to be made into more Wood Tar, then send all of that into an MV Distillery to be made into Benzene. After having reached HV, the Distillery can be replaced with a Distillation Tower, which outputs Toluene, Phenol, Dimethylbenzene and Creosote alongside the Benzene. The first two are good fuels as well, alongside being useful for other chemistry.

Nitrobenzene is a upgrade from benzene and can be produced in a gt++ chemical plant (there is a recipe in the large chemical reactor but it should not be used if nitrobenzene is for powergen). While it appears to be a significant upgrade from benzene, it is not very popular as it reduces the ease of scalability of benzene.

Warning: XL Gas turbines might no longer accept benzene in future versions. The last version that is confirmed not to contain this change is 2.3.3.

Single block naquadah reactors produce large amounts of power at a constant eu/t, as stated on the machine's tooltip. These drain power depending by depleting tiberium/enriched naquadah/naquadria screw/rods/long rods into normal naquadah screws/rods/long rods, converting it into an internal buffer that is drained at a constant eu/t. The efficiency of the machine multiplies the EU potential of the rod, giving the true energy per item. They are best for remote mining drills and should not be used as a main source of power.

Multiblock naquadah reactors, while also being called naquadah reactor, are completely different from single block. They consume nuclear based fuels for breeding and naquadah based fuels for power generation. There are five tiers of naquadah fuel, with the MK1 and MK2 fuels made in fusion reactor and chemical reactor and avaliable in UV. Naquadah fuels starting from MK3 are made in the naquadah fuel refinery, a multiblock avaliable in UHV. Naquadah reactors also consumes liquid air and accepts coolants and excited liquids to boost output. Coolants boost efficiency (extra power output without extra fuel) and avaliable ones are: IC2 coolant: 105% efficiency, super coolant: 150% efficiency, Cryotheum: 275%. In practice cryotheum should be used. Excited liquids boost fuel consumption (and providing extra power output) and avaliable ones are: molten caesium: 2x, molten U-235: 3x, molten naquadah: 4x, molten atomic seperation catalyst: 16x.

Naquadah reactors are considered to be weaker than plasmas turbines, but this might change with future rebalances.

Fusion is unlocked in late LuV, opening the gate to ZPM and also to very powerful power generation. The Fusion Reactor is needed to create some new materials, but the plasma itself can give out a lot of EU if processed in the right machines. Not all the outputs of the reactor are plasmas, but the ones that are can all be used to generate power. Fusion reactors have unique 2/2 overclocks per tier.

The reactor itself needs a large, initial EU input to start working, and then needs additional energy while it processes the inputs into the outputs. If it ever stops, it will need the initial EU again to resume working. After getting it to work, the plasma can be moved into one of several machines. Plasma turbines converts it directly to EU and also outputs the molten version of the material that the plasma was made of. Large plasma turbine is avaliable in LuV and XL plasma turbine is avaliable in ZPM. Large plasma turbine does not accept tectech dynamo hatches while XL one does. Instead of this, the EHE(Extreme Heat Exchanger) can also be used to generate supercritical steam from the plasma, adding another step to the process but triples the fuel efficiency. While the EHE appears to be the superior option, it does not scale well, so it is only recommended to company regular fusion reactors and not compact fusion reactors.

Plasmas that are commonly used for power generation are helium and tin plasma. Helium plasma produces 2,560,000 EU/t on a MK3 reactor (before turbine and EHE efficicency) and is generally preferred due the source materials (Helium-3 and Deterium) being easily obtainable. Tin plasma produces 5,480,928 EU/t on a MK3 reactor and has the advantage of higher energy output and higher energy density (which is proportional to maximum processing capability of EHE).

Warning: XL Plasma turbines might be changed significantly in future versions, and harsh penalties will be applied to plasmas with low energy density that runs through good turbine blades. The last version that is confirmed not to contain this change is 2.3.3.