"-Solar Plants are half as powerful as Nuclear Plants
For realism and because of the inclusion of the following building."
Please for the sake of sanity replace word "realism" with "balance"
Because it's so wrong I don't know where even begin.

Ah. Wait. I just saw it in the screenshots. Still mutually exclusive. Cool.

(Don't mod games 3 hours past your bed time, kids.)

My apologies if you've already answered this (didn't see an answer anywhere) but does this maintain the mutually exclusive nature of solar fields & nuclear plants?

Uncoupling the solar plant from the wind farm would be great. Even if the two are (in gameplay) meant to be combined, the wind farm should be allowed to stand alone as an all-terrain (and lower bonus) alternative to the solar plant. Just use Building_LockedBuildingClasses to mutually exclude wind farms and nuclear plants from being used together and tie the wind plant to factories (like every other power source in the game), for balancing reasons of course.

I am curious whether the Solar and Wind Farms should be buildings or Improvements. Personally I would think making them as improvements sounds interesting. Just speaking my mind.

If you need someone to model them, I'd be happy to do that.

@Akinaba It's purely for gameplay reasons. The Solar Plant and Windfarm combined are the ecological alternative for the Nuclear Plant

See no reason why Wind Farm would require a solar plant. Frankly it can be built even at the most nothern areas. The only realy life regirement is that the region must have strong and constant winds. So... Maybe untie those two one from another? Also, what with the Tidal Electro Plants?

@Rakdar Sorry mate, but at this point I need to point out that the foundation of your argument isn't true. I never claimed this more was "realistic" as you simply put it. The first line of the OP is and was when you started posting: "This mod is meant to be a more realistic alternative to my Solar Plant Fix mod. " It was my opinion that this implementation was more realistic that my other mod, nothing more.

@the element WEll it started off because i didnt like how this was branded as realistic, so i did some research, got some faulty numbers which were then pointed out, and sicne i dont like to make mistakes i went and redid the research and published it again. And as opposed to rebutting me he said i was biased. So yeah. thats about the why of it and the tldr of everything to now.

So yeah. Mod is unrealistic, yet is branded as realistic

why are you people arguing about this?

@washell Never claimed i didnt have bias. But it would appear the facts are on my side on this one, try making an argument instead of an ad hominem fallacy, it lends more credence to a rebuttal.

Yeah... no bias at all... :)

(4/4) (1)https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/glossary/capacity-factor-net.html
(2)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor
(3)https://www.nei.org/Knowledge-Center/Nuclear-Statistics/US-Nuclear-Power-Plants/US-Nuclear-Refueling-Outage-Days
(4)https://www.wunderground.com/history/airport/KADU/2016/12/1/CustomHistory.html?dayend=31&monthend=12&yearend=2016&req_city=&req_state=&req_statename=&reqdb.zip=&reqdb.magic=&reqdb.wmo=
(5)http://www.thewindpower.net/turbine_en_22_siemens_swt-2.3-93.php

(3/4) Coming to an average of 2.9 m/s windspeed for the entire year. Which when averaged out, and ignoring times when the wind speed is 25m/s or above when the turbines shut down to prevent damage if (5) is to be believed. The average energy output for the entire year per turbine is 0. Because the sieman turbines don't produce power at under 3m/s.
So You are correct when you said that the nuclear power plants do not make 1.5 million times more energy than a wind plant. They make infinity times more energy. Because throughout the year you are making no energy. And mathmatically Nuclear power makes infinitely times more energy then wind plants. So thanks for criticising me and attacking my math. I’m still right.

(2/4) But let's be generous and say it would take 36 since i'm a nice guy and i like to give the benefit of the doubt to my opponents as much as possible. And refueling happens every 24 months that averages to 18 days a year the nuclear plant isn't running which shrinks the power it could be making down to the range of 3,223,601MWhs-3,738,594.733MWhs. Every year. At least when its specific to the Fort Calhoun Plant.
With that dense material out of the way lets go over the Adair wind plant. The capacity factor for a wind turbine is 52.1% The math here is considerably more complicated. Since the adair plant runs on Siemens (No sex jokes here please). And lets just assume its running all throughout the year, They aren't, but just for the sake of argument lets say that they are. Starting in january of 2016 and according to the weather records of (4) in chronological order the average wind speed was about 9mph, 7mph, 8mph, 9mph, 5mph, 5mph, 6mph, 4mph, 5mph, 6mph, 6mph, and 8mph.

@washell (1/4)Okay, I’ll revise then. Not entirely sure where i went wrong so i’ll just do it over. To start with we’ll cover capacity factor, according to (1) states that it is the net electricity gathered for time, and for the maximum any given energy plant could run. Now the example given in the wikipedia article assumes that the reactor is a 1,000MW reactor. But The fort calhoun plant is not a 1,000MW reactor its a 484MW Reactor. And nuclear reactors in general have a capacity factor of between 80%-93%.With the equation from Wikipedia(2) . We have an monthly expected energy output of between 278,784MWhs and 324,086.4MWhs . simply convert it to days and multiply by 365 and you get the annual range of 3,391,872MWhs-3,943,051MWhs . from the fort calhoun plant annually assuming it runs constantly. Because Nuclear plants on average take 36 days(3) to refuel, which changes from plant to plant, the last time the fort calhoun plant needed refueling it only took 25 days.

@Lukebaird: that's the error Rakdar made. The figures for the windfarm list the 174800 as the total nominal power, which isn't the power it produces per day, but the actual load it can carry. Which, using his numbers, means the comparison is 174.8 mW vs 479 mW.

but anyway the information @Rakdar is very informative and I appreciate it, but I don't think anyone's going to accomplish anything here.

@Washell you switched units. The 484 mW was the capacity of the nuclear plant while the 174800 kW was the production of the wind farm over 24 hours.

@Rakdar, learn math and electrical engineering. Fort Calhoun outputs 484 mW or 484,000 kW. The Adair windfarm outputs 174,800 kW which is roughly one third, not 1.5 million times less.

@TofuSojo Hey you can have wind farms in the game, I'm just saying with current implementation they arent all that realistic. And they would not be fun to play with if the nuclear plant gave 5+ 5% and the wind plant which comes later gives 3.3e^-6 production. It'd be useless. It just irked me that you said it was realistic, and then when i disputed it you said i was following bad research, ignoring evidence, and cherry picking data, which I certainly was not. So yeah, All i wanted to say was your mod was about as realistic as the anime mod that makes the detriments of nuclear fallout actual positives instead.

@Rakdar I applaud your detailed information, but honestly all I can say is it's just a game. I felt it was more realistic to have wind farms included in the game. The precise way that is done is subjective. Civ 5 only allows buildings of certain parameters, nothing in the game is true. It is all abstraction.

(4/4)It also takes up a total of 660 acres, and has an easement plant that takes up another 580 acres for for a total of 1240 acres or 1.9 miles, specifically in the case of the fort calhoun plant. in orfer to compare apples to apples they need to be in the same units though. 11,496 MWh amounts to 11,496,000 kWh. Which is about 1.5 million times more then your rinky dinky wind plant, And they can go just about anywhere. It's half as large as your smallest estimate for a wind plant and produces 1.5 million times more power, I think it's fairly clear that Nuclear power is indeed stronger then wind power.


Put simply Wind power is really weak compared to nuclear power. It takes up more space and gives a fraction of the energy.

(3/4)76 turbines which produces in total 174,800 kW in a day which amounts to 7.25 kWh each hour of that day. The cleared area around a wind turbine has to be around 10 times the size of its corresponding rotor or else it would make it so that the turbine in front of it or next to it doesnt block wind, Which for each tower depending on the model is anywhere between 32-78 acres, if the turbine is to take advantage from wind only in one direction, like a stationary solar panel, or if its to take from any direction 82 acres-111 acres. So depending on the model of the wind turbine, the adair wind farm takes up between 2432-8436 acres So between 3.8 sq miles- 13.181 sq miles. and It cant be built in cities or around trees. Now, lets compare it to a nuclear plant. The Fort Calhoun plant has a capacity of 479 MW, and if it runs it at 479 MW for 24 hours it will generate 11,496 MWh.

(2/4)to run in the interim.

Oh and a side note, Wind turbines would be great in really high windy areas right? Except large scale wind farms all shut down at 55+ mph. Wind enegy is Garbage. Solar enegy is extremely expensive to produce and maintain and only work in places like nevada, utah, basically deserts, anywhere else and they are also garbage, at least until we can improve tech for it to capture more solar enegy. Oh and things like SOLAR FREAKING ROADWAYS certainly arent helping things either spreading misinformation left and right.
Nuclear power on the other hand are smaller scale, They are steam engines for the most part, and while the potential energy on fuel is about 3%, the "Waste" isn't useless, despite what many beleive, and there have been breakthoughs in molten salt reactors that are using the nuclear waste as an energy source making it even more inert.
Here lets compare the size of the damn things if we're going for efficiencies. The Adair Wind Farm in 2008 with its

(1/4)@TofuSojo Wind Energy is ultimately unreliable. If you were talking about small scale, like a personal home or a tiny village, wind power supplemented with batteries, natural gas, or something else when the wind is down works great. The problem with industrial wind power is the grid. constantly modulating the various suppliers to match the demand exactly. Wind plants respond only to the wind, forcing the more controllable "conventional" plants to change their output in response to wind production as well as to grid demand. And the need to respond within seconds to a drop in wind production requires a plant that runs more inefficiently than one that could run if the grid didn't have to cope with the unpredictable fluctuations of significant wind-powered sources. That is to say, wind farms may actually cause more fossil fuel burning. The huge wind turbines aren’t that great either, On average they only produce 25-35% of what they are capable of, and they are using electricity to

@Rakdar Only if you ignore most of the evidence and cherry pick facts that help your argument.

Nuclear power is far stronger then wind power and wind power is unsustainable. Realism i think not

it would have to be bulid next to a mountian

can you add a geothermall energy plant?

Maybe you could do a day and night cycle. The solar panels only give the production every 2nd turn. Thats way more realistic. Nuclear can continue its buffs. But they lower overall happiness.

Also this was from 2015.
So yeah.

@Hisotry2222 Several groups are working on upping their efficiency so they are more viable. Though it should be noted that our current solar tech is already profitable for personal residences. It's making it viable to industrial uses that is still being worked on, although they are about to or just did build a new big solar plant in california that should be able to provide a substancial amount of renewable power. Then there's the recent Japanese proof of concept of beaming solar power via microwave receivers, which can eventually be used for solar power satellites.

Natural gas has the same problem as coal and oil, it's nonrenewable and destructive to the environment. It they will linger until they become too expensive (many would say they already are) as better alternatives come out. Radioactives are in a similar boat, until we start mining them in asteroids, but they will only last until we finally crack cold fusion, which will hopefully be within my lifetime :P.

Curious... what are these breakthroughs?

Ultimatly, I think that the future is probably nuclear, hydroelectric, and natural gas.

@HIstory2222 That is very debatable. One could argue that are solar tech is in its infancy and there are several breakthroughs on the horizon to make it more efficient and useful, which might explain why it is an expanding industry. Also, you missed the point of the mod, as it doesn't buff the solar plant but rather adds the wind farm, which together is what matches the strength of the nuclear plant (without the chance to meltdown, if you use my other mod). Broadening its terrain restriction is just more realistic and makes for a better game. Ultimately it's all just abstraction to bring renewable energy sources into the game as an alternative to nuclear power.

I actually disagree with the premise of this mod. There is a good reason why Solar Plants have been designed less useful then you'd like: In the real world, they are incredibly inefficent when compared to nuclear, hydroelectric, coal, or even wind power.

It is completly unrealistic for any civilization to use them for a significant portion of their power needs.

@seidaneic

Don't forget corruption and waste. I miss being able to see how well I am doing at combatting such things from civ3.

Realisticly, if you cover a "tile" in the real world with solar plants, you'll be creating a helluva lot of energy, so a better choice would be to up how much it cost to build, but make it as good or better than nuclear plant. Sadly, civ5 lost a lot of realism, since it didn't add pollution, something even civ1 had

half efficient to make it realistic then making it cost more to build and maintain.... hmmmmmmmmmmmm

@jsnider193 True enough. I will try to make the teasers clearer about what each mod does. Also, I do set my mods to not allow you to enable another of my mods that would break them (Renewable Energy and Solar Plant Fix, e.g.) and have them automatically load in the right order if they would have a conflict otherwise (Water Tiles Enhanced and Techtree Overhaul, e.g.). But ultimately you need to know what you have and what they do :P

nice touch but he clutter factor in my mod inventory and figuring out what is what (not your problem but game and steam) is becoming a bitch these days .. minimal clues as to what the mod does when select mods in the game makes it harer and harder to quess about conflicts .. I know need to keep better notes when dl these things but wish more info wouldbe there for us lazy folks.

thanz for all the nice fixes .. oh when you release ur omnibus mod make sure add instructions on how disable parts do not wnat or say gotta tke the whole marriage dude.

@jsnider193 Actually, I took the safety precaution of telling this mod that it cannot be enabled while either Techtree Overhaul or Solar Plant Fix is enabled, so no need to worry about a conflict.

presume will have to disable the old solar plant mod .. this looks like a nicer implementation.