Power production/Special accumulator usages

Reduce energy consumption in critical times

Accumulators can be used to limit the need for power for some parts of your factory.

There are naturally 3 items, which are good candidates for that:

• Radar
• Labs
• Electric furnace and electric miner
• Beacons

How does it work?

An accumulator has a lower delivery priority than any other power-using entity, this guarantees, that it receives only energy, when you have enough. At the same time it can deliver energy in another electric network. Both facts together works in this case as a regulated transformer and delivers only energy into other networks, if you are producing enough. Or in other words: in a power shortage, only the unimportant parts of your factory stop - not the whole factory.

This is fine if you want to guarantee that basic functions of your factory keep working (lasers, ammo production, very dependent on your priorities) no matter how much power usage you add.

This especially makes sense for radars - the radar explores new parts of the map, and consumes a large amount of energy. It makes sense to limit it, because when you are low on energy exploring is the least important thing.

In general this is a technique which works well only when you just researched accumulators and solar panels, but don't have enough resources to build big solar farms and accumulator farms.

- todo : pics from a radar station, research labs and electric furnace behind an accu. -

Minimizing need for Steam power

• http://www.factorioforums.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=5585

Order of with accu connected networks

• Powering sequence - the order in which accumulators are loaded. This is also about how the electric network orders internally new networks.