Moving to Clean Energy in Layton City #CitiesSkylines

63% comes from clean sources

Power is a serious business for a large city such as Layton City. Placement of power plants also matters too as the tsunami saga showed when the City Centre was “cleaned” but the power plants were missed. In Layton City nearly two-thirds of its power is produced by non-Green House Gas emitting power plants with nuclear taking the lead.

Unfortunately a quirk in the game means you need incinerators for rubbish as your landfills do fill up and need to be emptied some how. However, and rather fortunately the main Layton City recycling plant recycles about 50% of the City’s trash lessening the need for incinerators. That said those incinerators still produce 17% of the City’s power so at least not all is lost.

Below is a pie chart of Layton City’s power production:

As you can see the City’s four nuclear reactors produce 56% or some 1.92GW/h of total power with gas next in at 20%. The topography of Layton City rules out hydro but a large ocean means I can increase off-shore wind production. There is plenty of capacity in the incinerators so no new ones will be built for a long time even on current growth projections.

However, the demand load is at 90% of total power production so I will be needing a new power plant to be built soon. The question is what. I am most likely to build a new nuclear power station in the inland area of the City away from the Tsunami prone City Centre. While the new nuke plant would take its share to about 65% (meaning clean energy goes to 73% total) gas still forms a large part of energy production. Location of the gas plant is also a factor as it is next door to the energy intensive ore production complex decommissioning the power plant is not straight forward even replacing it with nuclear (becomes expensive to commission two plants back to back). That said the plant will be eventually replaced.

Heating wise Layton City is a temperate climate like Auckland so it can get cold at night. Heating using electricity would tax the power plants that are already at 90% as well as being straight inefficient. So I use a central heating system that covers about 60% of the City (still need to retrofit the historic parts) that draws on geothermal energy – aka natural steam.

Currently 640MW/H of electricity production is saved through the geothermal heating system (load is at 85% capacity) when it gets nippy at night. I prefer using geothermal over oil boilers for both cost and emissions (or lack thereof). Eventually I will get around to retrofitting the historic districts with central heating.

Here are some pictures of power and heat production in Layton City

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As for cutting emissions down further? Time to improve the transit system.