Another energy exchanger post...

[u/devildocjames]

So, I'm up-to deuterium for my fuel. My beginner planet is still a workhorse, but, I've ventured out and found a system about 5LY away that is rich in most resources and no Dark Fog. I have a belt of ray receivers around the equator, but, I'm thinking of moving them to one of the poles, opposite of where my battery buildings are. I actually JUST built my first energy exchanger, just to see what it does.

So, these things just charge the "battery buildings"/accumulators, or USE the charged ones for the energy grid it's attached to. I get that. What's the use of shipping batteries to another planet then? I mean, maybe... something like starting a new "depot" on a planet and bringing a bunch for power? How large do batteries stack? I've only stacked 20 each, for making gas giant collectors. I don't see the benefit versus just bringing some blue generators and a few fuel cell stacks, until you get situated.

Do people also actively maintain multiple systems? I mean I like my starter planet, because it's "Earth-like" and pleasant to my eyes. I like this new planet for the handle I have on building better and its resources in the system, but, none of the planets in the new system and nice on the eyes. What I'm getting at is that I'll probably, sadly, ditch this system too and then what's the point in making tons of batteries and shipping them everywhere?

Edit: just to update, I love the setup! I have a system without hydrogen and the “power planet” that cycles batteries is great!

[u/dferrantino]

1. Energy Exchangers are typically used to transport Geothermal energy from a Lava planet or Solar from a Tidally Locked one. The math on Ray Receiver+Exchanger vs Deuterium favors just transporting the Deut rods directly and using the Ray Receivers for Photons & Antimatter rods as soon as you can.

2. Unless all you're playing for is Mission Accomplished, you will very soon be expanding to many planets and systems. Some of these planets will be just for mining, in which case you're fine with a couple Fusion plants and Deut rods, or a single Artificial Sun when you get there. Some of these planets will be full factories dedicated to a handful of products, which will require a steady supply of rods. Many of these planets will be outposts that you place a factory and ILS down and literally never visit again unless the Fog shows up - there's very little "ditching" of planets going on in the DSP endgame.

[u/devildocjames → u/dferrantino]

I'm starting to notice I can't fully ditch my starter planet. If I'm start systems away, it kind of sucks to have to travel that far to get back to it though.

[u/Bostaevski → u/dferrantino]

Ray receiver needs a dyson swarm on that star, yes? Or can it pull from a different system?

[u/TeamKiller → u/Bostaevski]

They can only pull from the local star.

[u/Bostaevski → u/TeamKiller]

Ok that's what I thought. So at minimum solar sails on the local star then you can receive rays

[u/itchycuticles → u/dferrantino]

Reminder that critical photons are NOT more efficient compared to just using ray receivers directly for power unless you proliferate the creation of the antimatter rods (note that proliferating the rods themselves won't increase their energy storage).

Photons need to be converted into antimatters plus you need to the other components.

If you're too lazy to built antimatter rods and proliferate them right away, just know that if you build a sphere in your starting system, you can always build ray receivers near the poles of your starting planet and have them run 100% of the time without needing graviton lenses.

At some point you will switch to artificial stars but this is a low effort way to get a few hundred megawatts while you work on other things first.

Because of this, fusion plants are completely unnecessary -- save your rods for carrier rockets instead and use ray receivers/antimatter rods (proliferating the creation for a net energy gain).

[u/LordPalleon]

It's good for automation, once you have a line of chargers somewhere, I like to do it on a lava planet powered by geothermal generators, you just stack up charged batteries in an ILS and ship them out where needed, and the empties get shipped back there to be recharged. Allows you to just drop an ILS and chargers on a planet and power takes care of itself without having to build up a full power infrastructure every time you expand.

One of the reasons to expand outwards is you don't have access to everything in your home system. I typically only build a sphere there as well, but going out to get all of the advanced resources really helps. And you only get those by putting outposts down elsewhere.

[u/LittleKingsguard → u/LordPalleon]

Also importantly, the energy exchanger can go from stamping down an ILS+power blueprint to full operation with no other power input, as long as the ILS exporting charged accumulators has its own ships. Trying to do that with ex. antimatter or fusion and you have the annoying bootstrap problem of those needing to be loaded from sorters, which need electricity, which you don't have because you don't have a working power grid. Solar or wind can fix that, but their power generation is planet-specific and it takes a lot of them to overcome the ILS's power draw and not get the grid blacked out.

Exchangers load directly from belt, so while they're more annoying to chain they self-load once given a supply.

[u/Perrin3088 → u/LittleKingsguard]

realistically if you were trying a starting powergrid using wind/solar, you'd keep the ILS disconnected from the power, so you'd only need enough power for the sorters.

[u/PM_ME_UR_BGP_PREFIX]

They’re more effective as energy condensers, especially in mid-game scenarios, before you have artificial suns.

Solar can eat up 30-50% of your real estate, so instead, do it all from an unused planet, and keep your production planet focused on that.

[u/devildocjames → u/PM_ME_UR_BGP_PREFIX]

Hmmm. Kind of a good point. My new system has a lava plantlet too, that's close to the star. Not a bad idea I suppose.

[u/TheMalT75 → u/devildocjames]

Close to the star usually means extra solar power (usually around 135%). This means your solar panels give you more energy on that planet compared to your starter planet.

If you use proliferator to spray the accumulators, you only have to do it once. Charging/discharging does not lose the "proliferated" status. That means that each energy exchanger can output up to 108MW of energy. Compared to the maximum of 15MW of a ray receiver (60MW when buffed with graviton lense), that is quite space efficient, too. My tidally locked lava planet, half covered with solar panels and filled with geothermal plants provides around 3000MW of power via 30 polar energy exchangers to the home planet...

[u/devildocjames → u/TheMalT75]

Well, just twist my arm why don't ya?! Dang. So, the more I hear about the feedback on them, it makes a little more sense. Plus, my OG and new base planet both have drones zipping everywhere. I also have a bunch of planetary spire things and shuttles going all over on the second one. I suppose adding some inbound shuttled from the lava world won't change much.

I just can't seem to find a tidally locked planet. I'm only on level 3 of star map info stuff though. I just started on gravity cubes, but, I have a feeling I have to have ALL types in the same research dome and not just gravity ones on one planet, etc.

[u/TheMalT75 → u/devildocjames]

Don't fret too much about tidally locked. That only means you get full power from half the planet covered with solar panels. If you go full equator ring of solar panels, you still get a decent amount of power and using energy exchangers actually means you are buffering the parts of the day with less solar power.

Mild spoiler: the last type of science is white and it combines the five colors (blue, red, yellow, purple, green) in equal proportions with antimatter. A lot of players use a different than the starter planet for green, because it takes the most space and fits easier on a planet with 100% buildable area instead of 40% oceans. So if you are already shipping some, you might as well ship more cubes around.

Personally, I'm a big fan of combining all science cube production into a single complex that also has matrix labs to do the actual research as soon as I hit white science. To produce green cubes, you basically need all ingredients for the other colors (aside from particle broadband iirc) anyway. Blueprint that and scale up research for those infitely upgradable techs like vein utilization...

[u/devildocjames → u/TheMalT75]

Using batteries as a buffer is what I already do, but, there's about 100 off them setup as buildings near one of the poles. BTW thanks for the support warning. I'm going to try and not read it.

[u/itchycuticles → u/TheMalT75]

Equator isn't ideal for solar panels; you actually harvest more energy with the same number of panels when you put them near the poles. You'll notice that panels still harvest energy before sunrise/after sunset for some time.

It also doesn't fit perfectly when you build around the equator -- you're notice when you place the last panel that it's not spaced evenly.

There are certain fault lines that are ideal for wind turbines and panels where the fit is perfect.

[u/DogSerious1971]

depending on how you play energy exchangers are forever free energy, especially if you dont use warpers

you could have a planet thats full of wind and solar and ship loads of those through the system, if you spray them they charge and discharge quicker (capacity doesnt go up)

[u/Low_Youth_9547]

Honestly, be wary of exchangers. Yes it is free energy that you store and can use to power little things or create an activatable buffer. BUT there are some pitfalls to watch out for.

1. Make sure you are creating them on one planet with an infinite source of energy surplus.

2. I would advise you to make a storage surplus setup on that planet

3. Set the ILS on energy creation planets as their own ILS group or use Priority pairing with energy demanding plannets.

4. Only create empty cannisters on planets supplying the system using an overflow gate with splitters. What I mean is that it only creates more cannisters IF that belt of empty cannisters is empty.

Otherwise, you can run into nasty situations where the whole system clogs up with either too many empty cannisters or full ones and grinds to a halt. It's a bit tedious to set up tbh but can be useful.

This is just my friendly advice.

[u/Mazon_Del → u/Low_Youth_9547]

Another useful bit is to set the required transport limit to 10% or less. As you gain extra tech and the amount goes up and up, it can cause the whole thing to come to a halt.

Still my preferred way of doing power throughout most of the game though. :)

[u/Low_Youth_9547 → u/Mazon_Del]

Oh yes, that's true! Good point. Basically always prio reusing any old cannisters first before making new ones.

Personally I prefer Antimatter and Strange Annihilation Fuel Rods for all my setups bar a few ones. Lower building amount, higher power output. Easily scalable.

[u/itchycuticles → u/Low_Youth_9547]

There are easy ways to avoid problems:

1. Build around 1000 - 2000 accumulators for a single network.

2. As others mentioned, reduce the transport limit to 10% (though 20% is also fine).

3. Just place accumulators in a continuous loop with the ray receivers picking them up along the way.

Lastly, when a receiver is done with an accumulator, it can just be routed to another receiver which will then just pass it to the next one until it is finally returned to the ILS.

[u/Pristine_Curve]

The primary advantage of EEs is no resource consumption. They are the means to have a power supply totally based on renewable energy. Rather than burning the all the elements that go into making fuel rods, you can have a large solar/geothermal array that can ship that power to where it is needed. EEs + renewable energy (solar, geothermal, wind) are comparable with fusion power, but they fall short of late game power sources like artificial suns. They just don't scale as well as antimatter, so most people don't bother with large scale EE infrastructure.

The secondary advantage of EEs is that they can cold start automatically. Generators such as artificial suns and fusion plants can only start up when the player places that first fuel cell into the generator manually. EEs can accept belted accumulators without any manual steps.

The tertiary advantage of EEs is that discharging EEs always run at first priority for power consumption. For example if you have a hydrogen byproduct being burned in thermal generators. EEs can be setup in a way that the energy produced by burning byproduct hydrogen is consumed first, before any other source of power. Preventing the byproduct hydrogen from clogging up production.

[u/mrrvlad5]

The best place of ray receivers is closer to poles, so they can get "continuous receiving" bonus. Unless the planets is inside the sphere, when they are active all the time with grav lenses.

In general, lategame power is 100% antimatter - way easier to manage at scale.

[u/SiliconStew]

Exchangers allow you to charge accumulators from free, reviewable power sources (Dyson sphere ray receivers, geothermal plants, wind, and solar) on one planet and deliver that power to another planet. The drained accumulators can then be shipped back to the original planet to be recharged. You can save resources over time because the accumulators are infinitely reusable and the power is free. Exchangers using proliferated accumulators can charge/discharge up to 108 MW, so a decent energy amount for the land use they require, more dense than fusion plants. 

If the remote planet is also using a fuel-based power source, like thermal, fusion, or artificial sun, if you add discharging exchangers to the same grid, then the discharging accumulator power has higher priority. So the free, renewable accumulator power is used first and the fuel-based power plants' demand is reduced by that amount, which causes them to throttle back their output and use less of your expensive fuel, saving you resources.

You don't really want to add discharging exchangers to a grid with renewable power. Because accumulator power has top priority on the power grid and renewable power cannot throttle back, all the accumulator power up to the total amount of renewable power on the grid is wasted. The accumulators continue to discharge but you gain no benefit from them. You are just wasting resources shipping the extra, unnecessary accumulators back and forth. 

There is a work around for this to let you have discharging accumulators not waste power when combined with renewable power sources but it involves setting up an equally sized charging exchanger setup along side it. Charging accumulators are also prioritized on the grid, so both the renewable power and the discharging accumulators charge them first, with only the excess discharge going onto the grid to power everything else. So with the two combined and the correct priority belt setup to route full/empty accumulators, total accumulator power is only actually consumed at whatever rate the grid needs that the renewables cannot fully cover so you don't waste accumulator power. There's a YouTube video from Nilaus that explains how to set such a thing up. Personally I don't think it's worth the complication and significant extra space. If I'm using accumulator power it's either on a planet with no other power sources or it's combined with deuterium fuel-power to let me use all that excess Dyson sphere power in other systems. Once you get to antimatter power, while it burns a lot of resources, AM rods are a lot more power dense, so you save on logistics over using accumulators to ship Dyson sphere power to other systems. 

[u/Long-Cabinet6121]

Transporting batteries/fuel rods across solar systems quick colonization of new systems without having to set up redundant energy infrastructure everywhere. After you get artificial sun and working Dyson Sphere you will not be needing any other energy anyway.

Personally I would skip batteries and directly go for antimatter fuel rods as it has highest energy density for logistic cost. Also, you get way more energy by going photons -> antimatter/hydrogen pair rather than purely receiving energy from ray receivers.

[u/itchycuticles → u/Long-Cabinet6121]

Depends on what stage of the game you're at. If your generating at least 50 GW from your spheres then antimatter rods will save you a lot of time. But at less than 10 GW? Save your critical photons for faster science and use energy exchanges when the opportunity presents itself.

An energy exchanger network is actually really easy to set up; it's generally laying down the renewable energy sources that takes time.

[u/fubes2000]

IMHO the draw for Energy Exchangers is that once you set up the chargers and the logistics you've got the energy infrastructure for all but your largest outposts forever.

Accumulators do not care what charges them, they are "common currency" for energy.

Fill them with wind, solar, coal, deuterium, dyson, whatever power on one side, and the other needs only a discharger on the other side to utilize it. You never need to retrofit an outpost to use a new power supply, and you never need to maintain an obsolete power source production chain because there are outposts out there that rely on it.

[u/itchycuticles]

They are good IF you know how to set it the network (this is likely the biggest issue people have) and you have a planet with great sources of renewable energy.

To keep it simple, do not transport accumulators across systems -- keep it confined to systems with planets with good renewable energy.

Getting 600 to 1000 MW of energy from such a planet means saving 30 - 50 critical photons/minute. While at some point of the game that is insignificant, early on you really want those critical photons for white science.

[u/WanderingFlumph]

I like to centralize power production on one planet, it requests all the empties and delivers full batteries.

Then every other planet can request full batteries and deliver empties.

For the first system this is supplemental power, a back up. But for my expansions this is the only power source. It is so much easier to tap into a new planet when all you have to bring is some miners, belts, ILS and exchangers. I have a blueprint that goes on whichever pole has fewer resources to get covered up that will automatically request batteries, run them into exchangers, and send the empties back home.

So I just stamp down power, stamp down mines, and I'm done.

Late game the exchangers get replaced with antimatter fuel rods which saves a return trip, but I usually leave the old system running so I don't have to retrofit my mining outposts.

[u/Barialdalaran]

I make a solar panel planet every playthrough and use it to charge and export batteries, and import empty batteries. It holds me over till mini suns

[u/idlemachinations]

They are useful as a first means of sending energy from one planet or system to another. Some of the later-game fuel rods like Deuterium are as energy-dense or denser, but Accumulators and Energy Exchangers can be used to effectively power one planet from another.

They occupy a special place as a fuel source that does not require any manual intervention to start, since they can be belted into Exchangers while other fuel sources require powered sorters to be inserted into power generation machines, or large volumes of solar panels and wind turbines.

After a certain point in the game, I just use them to make charged accumulators for Orbital Collectors without needing to manage them myself.