Ways of transferring energy inside a city

Future Game Industrial Stage
1

Ways of transferring energy between power plants and homes that a civilisation can use.
This was an idea I had but didn’t made post about it.

  1. Electric
related achievements(I love how this is like a literature review)
  • (76,Magic8Ball4)Occupational hazard: Create an above ground method of transporting electricity while your species has the same height or higher
  • (326)Global power: Have no need to install a lot of batteries for your solar power because you have a global power grid and electricity generated during the day in somewhere can be redirected to somewhere else where it is dark and everyone have their lights open
  • (333)War of currents: Have a war over which type of electricity is better, DC or AC
  • (370)Tesla is up to something: Use 25% of global electricity in one science fair
  • (397)Swift electrifier: Complete the electrification of your country 5 years after the discovery of electricity
  • (397)Tesla’s dream: Don’t use wires to carry electricity
  • (426)Erratic electricity: Your electric grid has a utility frequency that can vary by 50% throughout the day

This is the same as what we use, the power output is turned into electricity and transmitted with wires.

  1. Chemical
related achievements
  • (426)Physical link: Have a continious flow of a substance (that is burned to make energy) in your solar system between two planets
  • there were other achievements about fuel but none were about carrying the fuel

We use a electric and a chemical hybrid system. Lights, computers and washing machines use electricity but heating and cooking uses chemical[1]. If it was all chemical, the washing machines and computers would have engines like cars and the fuel coming from the pipes would power them. And the energy systems could be hiberdised in any way. Every house may have one engine and the fuel may be turned into electricity there, to be used by the devices in the house.

  1. Mechanical
related achievements
  • (32,DPHKraken)Just glue some gears on it: Become more advanced than humans with over 70% of your energy being stored as mechanical or chemical energy. AKA steampunk.
  • (333)Drusselstein[2]: Have a central conveyor belt transfer kinetic energy directly to houses instead of using another intermediary like electricity or fuel
  • (405)Completed without one cycle: Have (the drift velocity of the electrons in your wires or the mechanical circuit conveyor belt speed or the speed of the fuel that iis being pumped) times (the time between when you first built the infrastructure and when you completed industrial stage) be less than (the distance between your cities times two) for any two of your cities

This is the only one that we don’t use to carry energy even though mechanical is the first type of energy[3] that was discovered. Mechanic systems can be designed to be similar to electrical circuits

Conveyor belts[4] would be carrying the energy, but they wouldn’t be moving very fast(in long range wires), low current high voltage(so that the energy loss is small) corresponds to conveyor belts moving as slow ass possible (but being under high tension)

  1. Pressurised gas

So does anyone remember steam powered cars? They were a big sensation back in the day, but we don’t hear about them in the news nowadays.
Pressurised gas for long range energy transmission would be carrying a gas in pipes like the fuel system, but using the kinetic energy of the gas like in the mechanical wire system[5]

  1. AC hydraulics

If hydraulics and AC electricity had a baby, it would be this. Basically,[6] you move a liquid(incompressable), not a gas, and the point is not continiously[7] moving, but moving back and forth, and moving the machine parts[8] like a hydraulic system

  1. River powered

This one can’t have global adoption (or can it?(insert here vsauce music)), but still an interesting approach. Say you build a city inside the delta of a river. The river divides into many sub rivers in a delta before flowing to the sea, what that means is if your city is like Venice[9], every house can be next to a body of water that is moving with respect to it. Then you can put water wheels next to them and turn the flow of water into electricity, or movement for mechanic circuits.
A civilisation formed like this can expand up a river. They would form new cities preferably in river islands, then reshaping the river around them, dividing it into sub rivers. These cities would be long and narrow, expanding parallel to a river, encompassing it.

  1. Light

There are fiberoptic cables or the light is just lasered through the air, but the light is transmitted for its power, not information(maybe both?)

  1. Heat
related achievements
  • (337)Goldilocks expansion: Use heat pipes to connect two sides of your planet to increase the range of habitable climates after living in the twilight zone of a tidally locked planet

Use heat pipes to carry heat[10], and later turn the temperature difference into movement or electricity with a stirling engine. Here is what a heat pipe is

  1. Biologic
related achievements
  • (340)Blood brethren: (aware) Be able to share your blood with others, have one person specialise at eating and everyone connect to him when hungry. When someone survives a disease, have everyone connect to him. When someone is going through hypotermia, replace his cold blood for a quick recovery.
  • (387)Borrowing heat: Have a cavalry unit connect their blood with the blood of their mounts to not die of hypotermia

So you know how the heart pumps the blood and carries nutrients to all your cells? What if, there was a giant pump in the energy/breathing station, and it pumped to houses where [11] the blood is used by living computers(gmo lol) and living washing machines?
Alternatively, you can connect living organisms[12] that share their blood and make a pipe for blood from them[13]

  • Things to consider:

What are the advantages and downsides of each approach? How would cities powered differently interact? You can’t simply say “hey neighbour, can you give me some electricity for the next 6 months? My power plant just blow up” if they don’t use electricity. Does creating energy at a single spot necessary to begin with[14]?

(new) achievements
  • Race against time: Complete industrial stage by only using fossil fuels(no electricity, no dams or nuclear power stations, no creating your own fuel)
  • Biofuel world: Make your own fuel for fuel powered cities
  • Conveyor coal: Make fuel/conveyor belt powered hybrid cities, the fuel is coal moved in conveyor belts
  • Power of river: Be a river powered civilisation
  • Global egypt: Urbanise all your rivers
  • Why are we even still doing this in space stage: Terraform a planet that doesn’t have any rivers, and build cities that exclusively use river power(space/ascension)
  • Ecumenoriveropolis: Have a perfectly spherical/elipsoid planet, but its center of mass isn’t at the geometric center, so water flows from one pole to the other, powering your river powered cities
  • Naked target: Disrupt lasers used to transmit energy in any war(industrial/space)
  • Heat roots: Evolve heat pipes and use them for thermosynthesis
  • Milktap: Make milk flow from your faucets for consumption
  • Chocolate milk tap: Have a spiced/flavored nutrient flow from your faucets
  • Where is our spicy soup?: Have a revolution/uprising because of centralised liquid food distribution being low quality

  1. if it isn’t an electric heater ↩︎

  2. a very long and narrow country in Phineas and Ferb (like Checkoslovakia) where they have a giant hamster wheel powered by goats and it makes the washing machines spin at the townsfolks homes after switching through gears and adjusting rotation speed ↩︎

  3. I was thinking about robots in middle ages, mechanical clocks and antictyra mechanism, but if you count campfires then the first one is chemical ↩︎

  4. is that what they are called? ↩︎

  5. this may not be a good system, because of friction all the way ↩︎

  6. i am saying basically but i don’t have an in depth explanation. I am writing this as i invent/imagine it ↩︎

  7. i feel like i use this word a lot ↩︎

  8. that convert the periodic motion into whatever motion desired ↩︎

  9. if the islands are small enough, if there is enough surface area ↩︎

  10. covered with an insulator except at the ends (heat/coldness source and the home) ↩︎

  11. aside from people drinking it like tapwater ↩︎

  12. low tech version, not having a central pump (or maybe you are eusocial and the pump is the queen, and cities can be achieved in aware stage!(insert here oliveriver saying “oh no, not again”) ↩︎

  13. they carry only energy and minarels etc, they have their own lungs ↩︎

  14. maybe this should have been the first question. But the answer is yes for earth. Can every house be powered with solar panels placed on roofs or have a nuclear reactor? ↩︎

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