show us your powergrids and substations!

[Buzzit]

So how do you transfer your power in your regions
im pretty serious about how im going to distribute my power and i want it to look as realistic as possible
as many of you people know i bat powerlines for the game.
but today i just played arround with what many people created for the power for my region

at the moment i only use  the plopable lines because i don't like the maxis ones.
for my rural areas im batting smaller poles but those are still in development

so do you build a really advanced powergrid? or are you  using the maxis pylons only? let us see what you got!
im pretty curious what you people do with your power distributions! 

here's my starting picture its my first substation i constructed:

its consists out of 3  regional powerlines and 2 local lines

[rooker1]

I'm looking for something like that! 

Robin 

[Buzzit]

another sample:

as you can see this is my powersupply for the whole region
(but it was more a testing ground for my new stuff)

[metarvo]

I guess the substation just to the west of this coal power plant counts as a substation nonetheless, right?  This power plant is actually in one of the quads near the region's edge.  There are four 345 kV lines branching out to serve every corner of the region, which is unfortunately nowhere near finished yet.

its consists out of 3  regional powerlines and 2 local lines

Good work!  The variety and placement of the various power items, along with an access road for the utility trucks, make this quite realistic.    Your Power menu must be about as crowded as mine.    That reminds me of this huge substation that I've seen a few times.  It had about 6 or so of those huge lines.  Ironically, there was an upscale neighborhood that bordered the powerlines, which probably made for an interesting backyard view.  I'll have to Google Earth or Google Maps it to refresh my memory. 

[Buzzit]

looks great Metarvo! and jup that counts aswell everything that has to do with powerlines is welcome here
i think we are one of the fewer members here who are into a complex powergrid if i see how quiet it is over here 

sounds cool btw!
tobad germany doesn't have street view enabled(yet) because they have some of the largest substations i ever seen in my life
and they have one of the highest tower types in europe (as far as i know they are 60 meters high!).
if you ever find the coordinates of that place you told in your last post  would you mind posting them? im wonder how it looks!

[Girafe]

looks good metarvo but what are these flora mods, seems to be grilled by electricity 

[MITSOS]

This is the largest nuclear power plant in Dimland and probably in the simworld. its power is 9200 MW.
it has 8 reactors.

[aragornjdl]

Wow what a great thread to discover!

Buzzit, that power plant is a wonderful bit of messy realism.  I've never seen the concrete dome structure before. Are those they stereotypical cooling towers in the top left?

MITSOS, your plant looks very realistic!  but eerily so. At first glance I wondered if you were trying to recreate the Japanese Fukushima plant that has been in the news and on our minds lately. Are the BATs used for that available anywhere?

I'm planning the power grid and plants for my region right now but my efforts are quite amateurish compared to these... hopefully I can get some good ideas.

[MITSOS]

thank you aragornjdl.  no i didn't want to recreate fukoshima plant.i made this long time ago. but i have to admit that i base my creation on japanese nuclear plants because they are better looking.i released that picture because of what happened there.i hope that everything will be ok for all mankind. Dimland is a mixture of different styles. you can see that if you check out my cj.   

[Buzzit]

looks awesome mitsos 
where did you get that nuclear powerplant?
batted your self?
it all looks really good!

Wow what a great thread to discover!

Buzzit, that power plant is a wonderful bit of messy realism.  I've never seen the concrete dome structure before. Are those they stereotypical cooling towers in the top left?

I'm planning the power grid and plants for my region right now but my efforts are quite amateurish compared to these... hopefully I can get some good ideas.

those pieces are from a soviet area nuclear powerplant
but he also released them as seperate pieces
so i made them plopable to make a plopable powerplant. but this didnt worked out the way i wanted so i scrapped the plan for now (until i bat some myself)

if you want some good ideas for substations and powergrids just check out google earth.. just follow some powerline roads and see how it gets distributed.
or check out some powergridmaps on google.

if i released an fair amount of powerline packs i will try to make a tutorial for realistic power distribution. 

[metarvo]

Wow, Mitsos!  That is quite a power plant you have there.  It almost looks like a small city or neighborhood in and of itself.  Everything appears to have been carefully placed, and it looks great.  The Maxis power plants look really small when they are compared to the real ones, which are usually much larger.

[louistsw]

When I see the square, it just like Fukushima..
Hope that can be safe.

Will someone BAT it?
....

Well, I think my citizen will complain this.

[Buzzit]

i hope that in the future more people will use plopable powerlines it seems very few people are using them sofar

[louistsw]

i hope that in the future more people will use plopable powerlines it seems very few people are using them sofar

...Coincidently, plopable power lines are not available when I build the newest city..
Also, my Mountainous map is a problem for using with ploplines.

[Kitsune]

thank you aragornjdl.  no i didn't want to recreate fukoshima plant.i made this long time ago. but i have to admit that i base my creation on japanese nuclear plants because they are better looking.i released that picture because of what happened there.i hope that everything will be ok for all mankind. Dimland is a mixture of different styles. you can see that if you check out my cj.   

Mitsos ... where did you manage to find those reactor buildings? Or did you create them yourself?

[Buzzit]

...Coincidently, plopable power lines are not available when I build the newest city..
Also, my Mountainous map is a problem for using with ploplines.

thats something im looking into at the moment
wireless plopable is an option  it may look less realistic without wires but it still gives a nice touch in realism when we would look to distribution 

[mikeski]

Nice powergrids everyone.  Nothing special in my towns though, I still use the Maxis candy poles to distribute power in my region.

[jdenm8]

Wow, I never knew about this thread before. I don't use ploppable power lines myself, they don't like slopes of any kind and have the nasty tendency to not transmit power, but I do put a little work into making my Maxis powerline system remotely realistic.


Just some powerlines going over a Trumpet intersection that had its loop built wider specifically for the power lines (Cheaper to make the loop wider than to move the power lines).

That's all I've got so far, so I might take some more pictures at a later date.

[RickD]

i hope that in the future more people will use plopable powerlines it seems very few people are using them sofar

I'd love to. But my region isn't flat. If the pylons didn't have the wires on them they would be more usable. 

[Buzzit]

i'm currently figuring out how to make them look nice on slopes without wires
would you guys use them even if they wouldnt have wires?


@jdenm8
well i use a diffrent methode for that matter
you see the endings/substations are acting like powerplants so they accually carry in some way the power hehe.

anyways

here's a small substation wich is the first separation point for some smaller lines wich end at smaller regions or small cities and to further connect a regional line. its also a starting point for a chain of smaller medium voltage lines wich gives power to most of the farms and small villages in the regionblock


this is a substation where most of the regional lines cross.
there's also a line wich goes to a smaller city a block away.


the Southerneast powerstation wich supplies diffrent voltages
2 400Kv lines
1 380Kv line
1 220Kv line
and 1 110Kv line wich functions as  eyecandy only

unfortunately the substations aren't looking as realistic as i want
thats why i will model my own substations in the future