Electricity conversion efficiency

[David]

For power plants that use coal as fuel in the game, do you think their electricity conversion efficiency should be affected by quality of coal ?

We tend to think that this should be the case, as coal of higher quality is more expensive to acquire and they should produce more electricity to make gameplay sense.

[therealevan]

I would agree, higher quality coal versus lower quality coal should make an impact on electricity conversion respectively. This I think would create a small level of a playing field for the player or AI to seek out higher grades, thus paying higher premiums. David, do you happen to know how the math will work out conversion ratios for coal input to electricity output?

[Nazka231]

Definitely yes, that's why you can say that this coal has a better quality than the other one and so setting a level. Now the question is how much it will affect it and I have no competency here. However I know what you should find. You have to find the coefficient of efficiency and how much quality affect it. For instance if you try to buy a wood heater they will tell how it is efficient with XX% of efficiency now and blablabla. That's what you want plus how quality affect it. You may also find other way like knowing how many tons of coal produce X MW.

Speaking about that many low level countries use coal and gas power station because the level of tech is low (easy to build, maintain, etc..). But they produce a lot of pollution... And we don't have pollution in CapLab. Anyway the level of tech depending the country or region is also interesting. It is what you have in http://virtonomics.com/. Each city has a level of education, wage rate, and quality level of worker. This is one part that I really wanted to have in CapLab. Also there are many great ideas in this game like the different tax rate, the efficiency of workers, a ton of cities based with data based on real data, etc.. (but keep in mind that after a certain level it's a pay2win).

[Nazka231]

I tried to dive down all the data and analysis about coal I could find. So you do have a difference between each coal from each big region in the world. Each type has different properties. It can be more or less dirty, having a different atomic composition, can be more or less dry, etc... All of that change every important parameter. The most important ones are the kJ/kg of coal, and the Higher Heat Value (HHV) meaning the amount of heat released by a specified quantity of fuel.

You can find a quick summary about each unit used here with a short calculus example for a coal power plant here. And of course there is always wikipedia with a lot of information that I found on other websites. For deeper info, you should try every serious energy department (US, EU, World..) or institutions, etc... A good one about everything around energy in the US is EIA with many forecasts and analysis. Or from NETL, a long PDF to know a lot more about coal.