Power outages with excess power supply?

Question

I currently have a nuclear power plant with a second plant add-on providing me 400mw of power to my city. The data meter on my power says I have excess power (of over 100mw) yet I keep getting notices that some areas of my city are not getting power. I'm not selling my power to other cities, my powerplant is educated and not in danger of meltdown. Every building is connected to road and supplied properly. Why am I getting no power warnings from some buildings? Sims are moving out and my population is decreasing!

Side note: the power outages move around as well, one area will be affected, then get powered but will take away from another area. This tells me there isn't enough to power the whole city, yet my meter says I have excess. So what is going on?

Answer 1

The way that Simcity simulates power distribution is by creating agents (the little yellow dots) that travel along the power grid. These agents follow a random path under your roads and power each building along the way.

If you have a complicated road network and the unpowered buildings are at the ends of roads (so that there is only one way to reach them) then the agents' random paths are unlikely to pass by those buildings and the buildings will show as unpowered. To fix this, try building more road routes to the affected structures.

Answer 2

It can take a while for buildings to receive power. This is especially true if you have a large city that has had a power deficit.

I suggest that you look at the power layer (lightning bolt icon) to see what is going on.

You should see the yellow dots (power agents) moving out from your power plant along your road network.

Buildings that need power are shown as circles. They can be

1. Yellow circle. Building is fully powered.
2. Small yellow circle surrounded by orange ring. Building is partially powered.
3. Red circle. Building has no power

The yellow dots provide power to the first building they encounter that is not fully powered. A single yellow dot may be able to provide power to multiple small buildings.

Buildings gradually lose power and need to have their power replenished (by the yellow dots).

Answer 3

sometimes if they keep saying they are not receiving power, it is because the road where your supply is not connected to the city

Answer 4

This is what kills me. The whole concept of AC Power is that the shift of electrons is damn near immediate, however, Sim City, they have to get passed around all over the place in little balls, and the wait is excruciating for some buildings. A remote part of my city is not receiving enough power. I've noticed that the type of layout that you have in your city greatly affects the distribution of the stupid dots. While it might be cool for the game, power certainly never has been this unreliable, and this latent, nowhere even close! LOL It's comical really. But I think one of the things to do is to make sure that you have multiple power plants placed on either side of the city, or spread out. I have 486 MW excess power... and yet some of my buildings on the other side of the city can't get power. There's something very wrong with the game if it can't evenly provide power to all of the buildings at least in some minimal fashion of how electricity really works. And yes, I still play this game, I still find it fun... except when these stupid bugs are encountered... like the "we're overworked" bug, when basic human beings do not work more than they want to. Gives the impression that I'm forcing them to work or something. LOL Definitely still areas that really need to be fixed but probably won't.

Ok, adding this after... if you do have buildings that are a bit remote, one way to help alleviate the power issue like I just did, is building a simple dirt road as a bit of a power connector directly from the power source to the location where the power is not getting. By providing a bit more of a direct route to remote location, the power balls flow through that road to help get to the affected areas. Also, make sure to remember that mega-towers have multiple roads leading into them, so make sure they are all hooked up, not just one! Mine weren't mega-towers, but simple Omega factories on the other side of the map. I mean, 486 excess, and unable to get power to this location 96% of the time it seemed. The factory was off 75% of the time! So connecting a little dirt road on the outskirts down to that area, solved the problem. Stupid, but it worked. So there's at least a bit of a workaround.