Clean Power!

I would like the be the first to make a call for clean power in Simcountry! My power plants use oil for fuel. How not-green! At least we could move to gas, with its lower carbon footprint, or how about hydro-power! I call for solar cells on every home and government building! Ships will harness the power of whales and dolphins to travel the seas! The demand for oil plunge to an all time low and prices will fall to record lows. The air will be clear and peace and goodwill will abound in the world. Love will conquer the land!

Come, find this dream with me!

The only reason you can't run your car entirely on hydrogen gas is the compression ratio is not designed for the higher combustibility, specifically the pistons need not depress as far as they would for gasoline/diesel. Oil production and logistics is carefully controlled and as such easily rigged.

Now we have hydrogen fuel cells which are simply nothing more than lightly electrically charged metal plates where hydrogen gas contacts fresh air, and the hydrogen gas combines with the oxygen in the air along the charged metal plates so that hydrogen and oxygen molecularly fuse together and produce a very strong electrical discharge where h2o goes out the exhaust, just as it would if you burnt hydrogen in a combustion engine as well.

Seeing as how Simcountry takes place in the future, it makes no sense that there is a power industry at all because in reality hydrogen can be created through an embarrassingly simple process called electrolysis of water where for instance a very small electric current (splits h2o molecule), perhaps from a solar panel for instance, can create a large volume of hydrogen gas to be used as fuel in a hydrogen fuel cell or even a combustion engine.

The reason we use oil in the "21st century" is because it is what gives the USD value. This is also known as the 'petrodollar.' OPEC only takes USD for oil, and if you want to trade oil in any other currency than the USA will 'liberate' your country. Of course selling cars/power generators that run on fuels not produced by OPEC is out of the question.

Water is basically a powerful unrefined fuel. . . .it can be refined with nothing more than a solar panel, where it can be recombined back into water and the electrical discharge captured into capacitors or batteries or directrly into electrical motor, or used in a boiler to heat steam turbines for alternators. . .

Hydrogen gas has often been said by propagandists to be too unrealistic to refine, but they would never dare compare it to the refining of gasoline and diesel. It has also been said to be too dangerous to transport, yet there is no need to transport it other than from a building (or pump) to your vehicle, where only a small amount of hydrogen (a tank or so) is required to propel the vehicle. Gas tanks can be hardened to easily withstand kinetic collisions and gunfire. It would be interesting to see a vehicle where h2o is captured from a condensator and exhaust h2o rerouted into an electrolyser and back into a fuel cell!

The entire power industry is a pathetic scam, but while on the subject it may be worth noting that the majority of power plants use the burning of natural gas rather than oil to heat steam turbines.

As I said Simcountry is supposedly in the future and therefore I do not understand why there is a power industry at all. If you want infinite power, get a well and a solar panel. You can use a small copper wire, i.e. a clothes hanger, to produce infinite hydrogen fuel which can be refused into h2o through electrically charged plates or burnt in a combustion motor to propel a vehicle or burnt to heat a steam engine+alternator in a power plant. This is very simple stuff that has been around for more than a century.

Hydrogen is not the only answer though. Nikola Tesla put a coiled copper rod in the ground and it produced a ton of energy. I won't even bother getting into that or I'll be labeled a 'conspiracy theorist.'. .

Just know that you pay for electricity because you are being robbed. There are many businessmen out there who literally do not want the people to have the power or they would be out of business.

The reason you may have not heard of this is the same reason you may have not heard of fractional reserve lending pyramid scheme, the world not being a ball spinning in 4 different directions, the designed failures of bolshevik communism, endless wars of the petrodollar and maintaining currency exchange rates, and many other things you probably should have heard of. . .

by the way, you mention "carbon footprint.". .are you aware that co2 (carbon dioxide) is plant food? The more co2 produced, the more co2 is absorbed by vegetation, and the more vegetation spreads across the world. . .burning of oil = more plants! Have you ever seen plants growing alongside a heavily trafficked road? I bet you have!

That is all I have to say on the subject of 'clean power.'

If you ask me, the needless power industry in Simcountry is an interesting aspect to the game that is Simcountry and I have no issue with it, being in a mere game that is. If you want change I would much rather see the ability to create multiple units!

Since I am employed in an industrial that supports power systems, I must state a few facts.
Hydrogen is less energetic than natural gas or liquid fuels. Thus you need more hydrogen than say natural gas to run anything.
Also water is a very stable form of hydrogen. Thus, breaking it up to hydrogen and oxygen and then recombining it to water is actually a net energy loss. This means you would be better off using the electricity from the solar panels. Add to that the fact that internal combustion engines loose a lot of energy from heat and you would have a lot fewer losses using the solar energy.

My post was just motivated by power plant using oil. As a side, the number of employees at one station is about the same as all power plant employees in the US making thousands of time as much power - they are very inefficient

We intend to add wind and sun energy.
These corporations will be added but we do want to add incentives for players to use them and we will also add coal generators.
Very polluting but also in the real world they are used a lot and pollute a lot.

As we are in the future, should we consider fusion?

We do have nuclear power and we see many times that its price is much lower than oil generated power but it is not bought.
It could be bought and sold on the market for a much higher price.

I agree, the number of workers is huge and will be reduced.

Numbers of workers are very high to prevent the number of corporations from exploding, making the game too difficult and processing very long and complex.

Would wind and solar energy become electric power in the end? Some players buy nuclear energy as an alternative to electric power because it is cheaper, but countries don't consume nuclear power or buy it automatically. The nuclear power turns into electric power, as the only power source countries and corporations consume. Would solar and wind power just be more to add towards electric power as a whole? Will countries start consuming wind, solar, coal and nuclear energy separately? Better yet could countries and corporations set a ratio for these power sources in order to get the cheapest/most efficient power sources. Of course that would need to have pollution added as a penalty.

Pollution could effect the welfare of a country/corporation. A highly polluted country where most of its power is generated/bought from coal, and natural gas would have negative points towards country welfare, and people would die younger and more often from exposure to the pollution. A country with more expensive, but clean energy like solar and wind( maybe nuclear )would have better welfare and higher life expectancy and health.

My imagination tends to go off track when I see GM responses. I know most of this would be too much to implement in the near future, but it would be awesome if we had more things effect the welfare index.

Increasing the fluctuation of welfare could make players have more choices in productivity and profitability.

Edit: Maybe all corporations should have a system in place that states the level of pollution each corporation produces by the supplies it consumes. That way players can chose what type of power corporations consume. Also when countries consume products there is nothing left. Wouldn't it be better for consumed products to end up in landfills and/or recycling centers. This would employ more workers in those fields. Of course recycling would be more expensive but some products can be reused, and landfills can produce methane gas for power. However I would imagine something like this would take a very long time to implement into the game, which is why it is just my imagination.. it would still be cool. Something to think about. Not like you guys don't have enough to do and think about all ready.

I believe that solar power, whether through solar panels or even heating water with mirrors or glass (if that counts??) could be a highly profitable industry with enough panels installed. The issue would be expensive start up costs, but once set up the energy is . . mostly free (free during day, yet massive amounts of batteries would have to be switched out regularly however to supply power at night).

Wind power on the other hand will NEVER be profitable. Wind turbines require several gallons of diesel fuel from generators to get the turbines started turning, and believe me when I say that the wind is not always blowing. Wind power also has the "NIMBY" (not-in-my-back-yard) issue that wind turbines are extremely noisy.

I do not think wind power will EVER get off the ground.

I am all for solar power plants though. I think the energy should be sold as Solar Power commodity and stored as Electric Power. It shouldn't be as affordable as Nuclear Power, but more affordable than standard Electric Power.

This is because nuclear power plants use only a small bit of radioactive material for fuel, which stays radioactive for very extended periods heating the water into steam. Unlike solar power plants, nuclear power plants do not require batteries. All that is required is access to water for the steam turbines that turn alternators. Nuclear power is a very low overhead process.

@John West they would need to have some drawback however. Sadly at the moment country land mass has nothing to do with anything other than war painting. You can cram 300 million population in a 1 mile radius..

Zen, I think pollution/smog is an interesting idea. Nuclear power does not contribute to this but there are slight radiation leak from nuclear power plants. Perhaps this could very slightly increase death rates of populations.

Jonni mentioned fusion, but then there would be no need for power companies because I would assume by the year three thousand whatever that everybody would have fusion generators the size of a desktop computer to power buildings and vehicles. I had actually thought this before mentioning hydrogen in my first post, but I figured I would just explain a simple and effective technology that we can all grasp rather than mention a more advanced technology (cold fusion) that I believe will soon become a reality in the "21st century."

With nothing more than water access (a well or water condensator like a radiator, air conditioner or dehumidifier for example), a solar panel, a copper wire (multiple plates of whatever conductive metal produce the gas considerably faster than one copper wire course), you can produce infinite hydrogen fuel, and so it seems inevitable to me that someday we will take advantage of this simple process. . .

and contrary to what Mac was saying, only a small bit of electric current is required to split the h2o molecules. The recombining of hydrogen and oxygen releases considerably more current (this is the basis for cold fusion which is a more complex process I have hardly read on and thus I know very little of cold fusion, yet I do personally know an actual scientist working on developing cold fusion power generators), but that is irrelevant because nothing more than a solar panel is required for the electrolysis process to produce an enormous amount of hydrogen.

You can leave a solar powered hydrogen generator on all day while you are driving your car elsewhere. When you get home/work/whatever building you can refuel your hydrogen tanks in a couple of minutes.

Commercial scaled hydrogen fuel stations (to refuel vehicles all day) would merely require more well pumps (or city water pipes/air condensators) and more solar panels and more electrolyser plates.

However at night the fuel stations would either have had stockpiled enough extra hydrogen during the day to continue refueling vehicles, or be plugged into another power source to continue producing hydrogen. This is the only real issue that I can figure with my idea of a solar powered hydrogen generating fuel station. A hydrogen fuel station would probably require storage for hydrogen gas to refuel vehicles at night, which is not at all unlike a gas/diesel fuel station though. For safety purposes you can store the hydrogen underground just as gas/diesel stations do (beneath the concrete you drive over if anybody never noticed, that's where gas/diesel is stored at fuel stations today).

how about having alternatives in the game like wind power or better yet solar power? Corporations could make panels and other items for solar power.

Fusion power is an excellent suggestion

Fusion (or hydrogen) power would mean no need for power companies. Everything useful eventually gets scaled down to consumer level with time. I would expect the same by the year three thousand something.

Instead of power companies, we could have fusion power generator companies though. That would probably be a highly profitable industry.

Car, truck and construction companies would require a supply of fusion power generators for vehicles and buildings.

We do not need to assume though that technology always improves in the future. Perhaps some technologies are gained and lost due to cataclysmic events. I would assume however that due to populations being decentralized by occupying several worlds that this would not be an issue, unless the entire star system were affected by cataclysmic event(s) such as asteroid collisions, wars, pandemics, financial collapses, etc.

and so it's really up to the GMs what technologies they would allow Sims to have access to in this future timeline, just as central bankers and oil companies do today.

One option might be if your country produces cheaper power (like fusion) then it uses more of it (people love cheap power). This would increase the need for more power-plants and fusion power plants would be expensive. They also use a lot of water, but that isn't a commodity in the game at the moment. The other option is that they would use a lot of machine parts and services (the fusion power creates steam which runs steam turbines which spins generators, all of which need to be maintained).

I was originally just thinking about letting power plants chose which fuel they use - oil, gas, or coal. That way there would be competition between those commodities or if there is heavy use for coal, for example, the plant could switch to gas or oil. It would be one way to relieve the deficient of oil in KB at least.

Will there be an impact on the welfare index for non-polluting energy sources?

your guys forget geothermal and Tidal power also very good alternate fuels to

i.e Carbon footprints. Want to see a big reduction in the real world? Raze the Amazon Rain Forest, and turn it into a parking lot, with 12 inch deep asphalt. That will lock down a lot of carbon. :P

Nuclear vs electric energy. Zen pointed out some pertinent facts. I'd like to point out one more. They are both used for the same purpose. But Electric Power is listed first. It's easier to scroll down to it, and buy the first one that pops up for manual sales.

There is also no Nuclear Power on the Direct Trade Page. Which is odd.