SimCity 133: Power

From laptops to refrigerators, the citizens of any first-world city require tons of power. Your job is to plop down power units to generate the wattage your people need to live their lives.

Here's the information you need to know about providing watts to your Sims, according to the pop-up on the power grid HUD:

• Build power plants to provide power
• RCI buildings that don't provide enough power will go abandoned
• If a ploppable doesn't get power, it will stop providing services
• Excess power can be sold to your neighbors
• You can buy power from your neighbors
• Power plants can import resources from the global market
• Local resources are cheaper than power purchased from the global market

Wattage

The amount of power you can generate usually depends on the source material that generates the power. For instance, a coal power plant needs coal. If you can't mine or buy coal, you can't generate power. So make sure that you plan ahead accordingly.

You also can't expect an even and continuous flow of generation materials. For instance, if you have a wind farm that produces power for you, you should expect that on certain days of the year, there will be no wind. With this being the case, it's advisable to have access to one of each type of power plant in order to prevent brownouts. The best way to do this is to barter with the other cities for shares of their power supplies.

Brownouts

When your power supply falls into the yellow (or even worse, in the red), then buildings around your city will begin to experience brownouts. This loss of power -- if allowed to continue -- will result in abandonment of whole sections of your city. With this in mind, anytime you see the power supply icon in your HUD lit up, investigate and solve that problem. This will save you a lot of cash.

When power supplies dwindle, the buildings furthest from the power station(s) will be the ones hardest hit and the first to abandon.

Land Values

Here's something that I figured out that the HUD didn't bother to tell us: when you plop down any power plant -- even the clean ones -- the land value in the area goes down. Keep that in mind when you lay out your city.