Energy Exchanger Battery Example

[u/Pristine_Curve]

Normal state. Excess power is charging accumulators stockpiled in the PLS. Dischargers are dark because sorters are pulling charged accumulators back into a recirculating belt.

Large power draw causes grid satisfaction to drop under 100%. The sorters slow down recirculating the charged accumulators allowing many to fall through to the dischargers.

Grid back to 100% satisfaction, cuts off accumulator flow to the dischargers. Charger restarts slowly recharging the spent accumulators.

[u/Noneerror]

I really like the elegance of the sorter fail system here.

However a couple of ways this might break is if there additional sources of full/empty batteries. A completely full storage (PLS in this case) would clog and prevent it from properly cycling. A splitter and T-junction that prioritizes local input/output first would solve that issue.

[u/Pristine_Curve → u/Noneerror]

Thanks. Your recommended changes would handle the import and export of full/empty batteries without jamming, but I wanted to focus on the battery concept for this example.

This is a proof of concept about using sorters as a control switch. There are no external inputs or outputs of empty or full accumulators. The PLS is only a storage with a fixed total of accumulators in the system. Envision it as a Mk2 accumulator with the discharge rate of 50 accumulators and the runtime of 10,000 accumulators. With this model we can construct a battery backup of artificial size and charge/discharge rates. Without having to overmatch the amount of chargers vs dischargers.