Another "trick" is those burner inserters are black start capable. They can pick up fuel and feed themselves to keep running without an electrical network.
I also tend to put Schmitt triggers in low priority areas. They've got a battery on the main grid next to them and if the battery drops below 50% power they remain off until it goes back above 75% power.
As for 50%/75% triggers--the game doesn't model start/stop problems, only fancy circuit setups would give a hoot about being fed by flickering power. (But as a human....I was out adding to a big accumulator bank at twilight. Far away the bugs had a base close enough to my laser turrets that they kept attacking. The sun was powering my base but didn't have enough for the turrets. The whole bank would flicker for every bug. Usually the electrical indicator on the accumulators is a good thing.)
> The burner inserter is the most basic and slowest type of inserters. It is powered by burning fuel, compared to the more advanced inserters which are powered by electricity. It will add fuel to its own supply if it picks any up, which makes it useful for filling boilers with coal. This has the advantage that it will continue working even if the power fails, as opposed to electrically-powered inserters which will be unable to function.
In particular, when power demand drops below the supply everything starts running slower, which in turn means that the electrical inserters used to feed coal into the boilers run slower which drops the rate of electrical production. Burner inserters don't have that problem.
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Schmitt triggers are really easy with stock multi combinators now. It isn't so much a "things have issue with flickering power" but rather "turn off the coal feed to the steel furnaces that would go to the electrical station instead" and "make sure that the coal unloading station doesn't brown out" and "turn off power to the electrical furnaces and labs to make sure that the coal mines don't dip in production rate when power dims".
The Schmitt trigger also makes for more reasonable "where is there excess oil that I should produce solid fuel from?" There's the optimal, but sometimes in the processing you can't crack any more crude to gas because the heavy oil is backed up, so turn on the appropriate cracking station when {conditions} and turn it off when {conditions}.
I'm just saying what's the need for a gap between on and off? How does the bounce harm anything in the game? Simply put the non-critical stuff behind combinators that will switch off at x% of power. Real world machinery wouldn't like that but the game factories don't care. Nor do the refineries--in your oil case, plonk down a tank of heavy oil, turn on the crackers when it's above a certain level.
https://wiki.factorio.com/index.php?title=Burner_inserter&ol... (edit from 2016)
> Since v0.10.0, any Fuel items picked up by a burner inserter will also be used to power the inserter. This makes it useful for:
> Automatically loading Gun turrets from a Transport belt, where one side of the belt is filled with magazines and the other with Coal.
> Filling Boilers with Coal. This has the advantage that they will continue working even if the power fails. This is not the case for electrically powered inserters.
https://wiki.factorio.com/Version_history/0.10.0#0.10.0
> Burner inserter will use item with fuel value for itself when it has empty inventory.
0.10.0 was released 2014.
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The flickering isn't a problem (though a high frequency flicker can caused the power chart to be difficult to read).
A consistent drain on power that is causing capacitor levels to drop below some threshold suggests that certain things should be turned off before the problem becomes cascading when capacitor supply drops to 0.
And apparently I misunderstood the mod, it leeches from things it could pick up but doesn't. It was probably written before it became stock and thus contained some out of date text.
Man I need to go play some more.
Starting back up from zero is significantly easier, as you are completely isolated and have zero load. You turn the power plant on, and start slowly adding local load to ramp up. Synchronize with neighboring plants where possible to build the grid back up. The only issue is that a power plant needs a significant amount of power to operate, so you need something to provide power before you can generate power. In most cases you can just piggyback off the grid, but in an isolated black start it means you need a beefy local independent generator setup. That costs money and it's rarely needed, so only a few designated black start plants have them, paid for by the grid as a whole.
And you're assuming that there is a throttle setting that lets the plant produce so little power that it only runs itself. Think of the Falcon 9--the landing is hairy because it's impossible for it to produce less thrust than it weighs. The engine will go out if you try to throttle it too much.