Talk:Solar Array

Has anyone done a calculation on the effective TCO of nuclear v Solar power in the game?

It looks to me alost as if its never efficient to build the nuclear plants, on the basisthat they need hydrogen, cost a lot more per level, and need significant investment in energy tech as well?

It would be good to see a direct comparison on the build costs and times on the wiki.

Working on the assumption that eventually, you're going to run out of fields, nuclear is much better. It may cost more investment to get it up to the same level, but it uses less fields to produce the same amount. I was calculating things today, and with my energy tech level (12), it would take a level 17 nuke plant to make as much (slightly more, actually) energy as my current level 26 solar array that i have on two planets already, saving me 9 fields. The cost of this would be ~860 hydro production, or two more levels of hydro synth (for where I'm at with that), for a total savings of 7 field slots. Those 7 slots can do a lot of useful stuff, so in the interest of the long term play, I'm switching over to nuclear.

tear it down!!!

I reached the same conclusion about it being better to switch to nuclear solely on the basis of fields available, but was unable to tear down a level of the solar array even though I wasn't currently building anything. Does anyone know if there is something else preventing the tearing down of a level of solar array, or if it simply isn't allowed?

ah ha.

I figured it out... apparently it costs resources to tear down, and I didn't have enough ore. So, there you are!