Purchased power not connecting with city
I've seen a lot of posts about similar issues without solutions, but I was told to post here anyway, so here goes. I'm playing solo, and I've got a region with two cities right now. One of them has ...
Forum Discussion
Hi @jawmusic27 - For the power sharing: Power available will fluctuate depending on time of day, and if your supplying city ever has interruptions in service (not enough workers/roads not connected/etc), that interruption will affect the receiving city as well. Important to note that when sharing utilities, the available power is split among the number of claimed connected cities in the region. So, if your supplying city has 2000 mw available and you only have one other claimed connected city, then 2000 mw will be available to City2. But, if you claim another connected city, the available power to each of them immediately drops to 1000 mw each. It also can take a bit to synchronize time between the two cities.
Were you losing power in (receiving) City2 while playing it, or were you seeing this from the (supplying) City1 regional view?
When you purchase power from another city, it can take a bit for the game to synchronize the power usage. The regional view from the supplying City1 will sometimes show a "needs power" message for the receiving City2 even if you're selling it. If, when you go into City2, it is receiving power then it is all good. The cities don't advance in time while you're not playing them, so it's more than likely a synchronization thing. If both cities are running fine when you go in to manage them, then just proceed from there. You will not have the city go abandoned due to lack of power if you're not playing it.
That being said, regional synchronization can be confusing sometimes. If City1 is a couple of years ahead of the others, and sometime in the past had a glitch with the power (say, traffic got bad and the power plant didn't have any workers for a small time) you may forget about that and then later, while running City2, it suddenly loses power for no apparent reason - it could be catching up in time to that one glitch. At this point, you have plenty of power for the needs on your other city, just be aware that with any service sharing you want to be mindful of how much the other cities will need further down the line.
About the solar farm: Solar energy only replenishes during the daylight hours (6 am to 6 pm). Overnight, it is running on battery power, which only replenishes if you have surplus during the day. You may show that you have 200 mw surplus at noon, but that is probably not enough to run your entire city overnight. This is why you're losing power intermittently.
For both cases, you need to monitor the supply and usage over the course of a few days, and try to balance your building with the power availability. I would suggest monitoring how much available power you have in the first city for a few in-game days, see if there's a time of day where it drops significantly. Once you know you have a significant amount of power available, go into City2, turn off the solar farm and buy the power from City1 again. Then monitor and see how much power it draws. You need to give it some time to catch up to the first city. If you keep the solar farm on, make sure the setting to share power is turned off. That way, it will only draw power from City1 when it needs it. Be aware it will not be immediate - it does take a bit for the yellow power to flow from one city to another.
I hope this helps. If you're still having issues, please share some screenshots of your power data maps. I may be able to give you more specifics.
Happy Building!
Thanks for the notes. I'll check and see about the solar thing when I get a chance tonight. That may explain the outages.
As for purchasing power from my other city, I only have two, so the fill excess should be available. I also haven't had outages in my main city since well before I started City 2, so that shouldn't be the issue. I know it can take some time to sync that, but it doesn't ever work. I've let it sit until my entire city2 burns down (hours in real time) and it never connects. I've also switched to my main city and let it run for an hour or two and it never connects from that end either. It always says "buying 0 of 2000MW" or whatever the actual number is (somewhere in the 1900's actually). If I switch to regional view it'll show the arrow indicating I'm sending power to the other city, but it'll never actually connect. I don't think it's a time delay thing, I think it's just not connecting to city2.
Incidentally, if I purchase power from city1, that should cover me when city 2 runs out over night (assuming that's the issue) and keep the blackouts from happening, correct? It'll purchase when the supply drops and then stop once the supply picks up again the next day? So rather than shut down my solar plant I can just leave it on and see if the blackouts stop and that should tell me if it's actually connecting? Just looking for a way to keep from having my whole city burn down while I wait to see if it actually connects.
I'll post some screenshots tonight.
JAW
Yes, City 2 will use whatever power it has available in the city first, and then connect / buy from City 1 when needed. It's been my experience, though, that you will always have an in-game hour or more waiting for the power to flow from one city to another. That's why I suggested turning off the solar to see if it works. Another consideration is where the two cities are in time - what year / month are each of the cities in?
You may want to zoom in to make sure all your roads are actually connected - sometimes in building and bulldozing, you can accidentally take out a small snippet of a road. If that happened right inside the entrance, it's possible the power can't get to the rest of the city.
Since you're playing offline / single player, you could do a "save as" and test a few things out first to see how long it takes to synch up various ways. Then go back to your main save to implement the solution that works.
My roads are definitely all connected, so that's no the issue. I'm including 3 screenshots. The first one is after letting the city run for a full day, showing I've got power surplus but still have portions of my city without power at 4:39pm game time, so after 9+ hours of daylight. There's no (reasonable) rationale for it to take that long for power to get throughout my whole city.
This next one is after I've shut down my solar plant and let it sit for over 24 hours of game time. You can see there's still no power reaching my city from my main city (and the main entrance road is clearly connected). I've let this sit similarly for 3-4 days of game time and nothing changes. For what it's worth, I have no idea why it says I have a surplus. I have no other power source in my city, and clearly power isn't reaching there from anywhere else, so that also seems to be glitchy.
This third screenshot is the view of the region showing that I should be receiving power, and that I'm using 0 MW of the 1969 MW that are available. Meanwhile, my whole city is shutting down and burning up because no power is reaching it.
I should add that I am able to share things like police, fire, trash/recycling, and I'm able to purchase ControlNet, (although not enough to cover everything when my towers are all down).
Thoughts?
JAW
