Electric Power Stations cancelling each other

[r0y]

As my small prison grew to over 100 inmates, my power demands exceeded the two (2) Power Stations I had running the place for so long. Simple, I just added two (2) more units in the utility block (yes, I planned ahead) - unfortunately, this does not seem to work at all.

No matter where (on the map) I place ANY new Power Stations, once they're installed and switched on, the lights come on and immediately I hear the dreaded power outage "click" - what can I do for more power?

Technically, these should just be emergency backup generators and the prison should just get an (ever increasing) monthly electric bill (same for water), but I get it... it's fun this way, too!

Is there a two Power Station cap? I've run into this before when I started making a SuperMax (hacked the blank initial save file to start with 5 mil, just to see if I could lay out a supermax). More than two Power Stations and no power at all.

[r0y]

I tar-balled my 3+ MB save-file, if you want to take a look at it. It is ~359kB tar.gz'd and can be found HERE (my dropbox)

[MrCool]

You can't have two power stations on the same circuit. Break the network into smaller sections and give each section a power station of it's own.

[RGeezy911]

Thanks for providing the save file, that makes it easy to determine what's going on.

You're making a common error that many players commit, and that is to connect more than One Power Station on to a Single Grid.

In Prison Architect, each power station should only control their own grid, and additional power stations must be built on a new grid that does not interact with other existing grids. In your prison, you have five power stations all connected to a single grid. As a result, they will each send high currents of electricity to flow within the wiring of the grid, and this eventually causes the Overcharge Protection to kill each power station to prevent damage.

To alleviate the issue, remove unnecessary power stations. From checking your prison as it stands, you only need one with capacitors to operate smoothly.

If you ever need to add more power stations, make sure the new stations never make contact with each other. Additionally, make sure their wiring never touches another station's wiring. This will be made easy for you because new power stations will have their wiring colored differently. (Your first power station will always have green wiring when electrified)

Hope this helps!

[111none]

Thanks for providing the save file, that makes it easy to determine what's going on.

You're making a common error that many players commit, and that is to connect more than One Power Station on to a Single Grid.

In Prison Architect, each power station should only control their own grid, and additional power stations must be built on a new grid that does not interact with other existing grids. In your prison, you have five power stations all connected to a single grid. As a result, they will each send high currents of electricity to flow within the wiring of the grid, and this eventually causes the Overcharge Protection to kill each power station to prevent damage.

To alleviate the issue, remove unnecessary power stations. From checking your prison as it stands, you only need one with capacitors to operate smoothly.

If you ever need to add more power stations, make sure the new stations never make contact with each other. Additionally, make sure their wiring never touches another station's wiring. This will be made easy for you because new power stations will have their wiring colored differently. (Your first power station will always have green wiring when electrified)

Hope this helps!

Ahh… I love it when we don't have arguments on the forums; how bout' you?

[r0y]

Yeah, I figured out that the Power Stations are actually (essentially) Circuit Breakers. The common mistake I made actually is how electric generation works, the generators feed into the system, but the circuits are separated by the breakers, etc. I saw someone's 700+ inmate prison and saw the isolated circuits.

Good to know!

Now, if we can just get this game to take advantage of multi-core CPU's! Sucks to have PA slow to a cccccCCCRRRrrraaaawwwllll with only 20% of CPU utilized (but CPU 1 of 8 is pegged to max)

Thank you all for the feedback!