Overview

If you've ever tripped the power limits of your coal power then you'll learn that you need to kick start your water extractors to get the coal power running again (after you've fixed the source of your power limits). This is the concept behind critical infrastructure power, provide dedicated power to the machines that provide the resources to your power generators. This includes the miners that provide the ore, extractors that provide fluids, pumps that move fluids and the supporting machines that create power items (compact coal, fuel, nuclear fuel rods). 

This then means that the actual generators that provide power to your production machines will be on a separate power network, and if you trip that power you will be able to reset the power switch after resolving the issue behind the power overload. You won't need to jump-start water extractors as these will already be powered by their own isolated network and will continue to operate regardless.

In early game, you can do this by creating a dedicated power network to power these machines, this could be 2-3 coal generators and expand this more as you add more power generators. As you progress to larger power sources like fuel power, you can transition your production power over to that network and perhaps use your existing coal power to provide the critical infrastructure power for your fuel creation machines. In later game you can even use geothermal generators to get up to 3600MW of free power.

Coal Power Part 10 Infrastructure Power

The Water Extractors and Coal Miner is your infrastructure power and should be treated separately to your production power (in my opinion). Fluid Buffers are incorporated now for demonstration purposes.

Coal Power Expansion

With 8 more Coal Generators and 3 Water Extractors built all that remains is to upgrade the existing Miner to Mk.2 and the conveyor belt to Mk. 3. In addition, the power required by the Miner and 6 x Water Extractors needs to be re-calculation to ensure the infrastructure coal generators can meet the demand.

Critical Infrastructure Power

The free power from the Geothermal Generators will be used to power the critical machines that ensure the running of your coal generators. These are the coal miners, water extractors and pumps. This is what I call critical infrastructure power and this means if you overload your main power grid, the essential machines that feed the resources into the coal generators will continue to operate regardless. Once you work out what caused your power network to trip, the coal power generators will begin operations without requiring you to jump start them with Biomass Burners.