Coal Power Plant Setup in Satisfactory: Ratios and Layout

Coal power is the first time the game asks you to balance two inputs at once, and the first time a badly sized plant can take your whole factory offline. The ratios are simple once you have them.

The core numbers

One Coal-Powered Generator at 100% clock:

	Value
Power output	75 MW
Coal consumed	15 /min
Water consumed	45 m³/min
Burn time per unit	4 seconds

The coal figure is worth deriving yourself, because it explains the alternatives. Coal carries 300 MJ of energy. A generator producing 75 MW burns 75 ÷ 300 × 60 = 15 units per minute. Any fuel’s rate follows the same arithmetic:

Fuel	Energy	Burn rate
Coal	300 MJ	15 /min
Compacted Coal	630 MJ	7.14 /min
Petroleum Coke	180 MJ	25 /min

Compacted Coal more than doubles the energy per unit, which means less than half the belt load for the same power. If you have the Compacted Coal alternate recipe, a plant built around it needs far less coal logistics.

How many generators per node

At 15 coal/min each, the arithmetic is clean:

Extractor on a normal node	Output	Generators supported
Miner Mk.1	60 /min	4
Miner Mk.2	120 /min	8
Miner Mk.3	240 /min	16

Multiply by 0.5 for impure nodes and 2 for pure ones. A Miner Mk.2 on a pure node delivers 240/min and supports 16 generators, which is 1200 MW from one node.

Water is the other constraint. At 45 m³/min per generator, one Water Extractor at 120 m³/min supports 2.67 generators. So a row of eight generators needs three Water Extractors, and 360 m³/min of water — comfortably inside one Pipeline Mk.1 at 300? No: 360 exceeds Mk.1’s 300 m³/min ceiling.

That is the sizing trap. Eight generators need either a Mk.2 pipe or two Mk.1 runs. The wiki flags this exact case, and it catches people who sized the coal correctly and forgot the pipe.

A layout that works

The shape that avoids most problems:

1. Put the plant near water. Coal belts long distances happily; water does not climb without pumps. Move the harder input the shorter distance.
2. Water Extractors into a Fluid Buffer, then buffer into the generator row. The buffer absorbs extraction fluctuation and pipe sloshing.
3. Coal in on a manifold — one belt past the row, splitter at each generator.
4. Size the water pipe for the whole row, not for one generator. This is the step most often skipped.
5. Leave space at the end of the row for expansion. Coal plants always grow.

Overclocking generators is linear, and that is unusual

Every production building in the game pays an exponent to overclock — 250% clock costs about 3.36 times the power. Generators do not. Since patch 0.7.0.0 they scale linearly: a Coal-Powered Generator at 250% produces 2.5 times the power and burns 2.5 times the fuel and water.

This matters practically. Overclocking generators is a genuinely neutral trade, so it is a reasonable way to squeeze more from a limited number of foundations. What it does not do is make fuel go further.

Worth knowing that the game data file still stores the old exponent value for generators. Any calculator that reads that field without checking whether the building is a generator will overstate the cost of overclocking one.

Fuel-Powered Generators for comparison

A Fuel-Powered Generator produces 250 MW — over three times a coal generator — and runs on Fuel refined from oil. It is the natural successor, and the transition usually happens when your oil setup starts producing Heavy Oil Residue that needs somewhere to go anyway.

Coal plants remain useful long after that, because coal nodes are abundant and the setup is simple. Most factories run both.

Why a coal plant browns out

Startup surge. Generators take a moment to spin up. Connecting a large new load before the plant is at full output trips the grid. Build power ahead of demand, not alongside it.

Water arriving too slowly. A generator without water stops producing entirely. If one generator in a row is dead and the others are fine, check where the water pipe runs out — a manifold fills front to back, and the last generator gets water last.

Undersized pipe. Covered above. Eight generators exceed a Mk.1 pipe.

Something invisible drawing power. A Hoverpack draws 100 MW and does not appear on the power chart. If your grid trips while you are flying and recovers when you land, that is why.

Working out plant size from your actual demand

Rather than building a plant and hoping, size it from the load you need to cover.

Add up the continuous draw of what you are running. Miners, smelters, constructors and assemblers all have fixed figures, and the total is your baseline. Then add headroom, because the things that trip a grid are peaks rather than averages: a train accelerating draws far more than one parked, and a Hoverpack adds 100 MW that never shows on the chart.

A reasonable rule is to build for roughly 1.5 times your steady-state draw. That absorbs normal peaks without wasting a large amount of coal on generators that idle. Generators only consume fuel when producing, so surplus capacity costs materials to build but nothing to keep.

Storage buffers on the coal line

A Storage Container between the miner and the generator row is worth the space.

The reason is restart behaviour. If the coal supply is interrupted — a belt upgrade, a miner relocated, a splitter change — a buffered row keeps running for several minutes while you work. An unbuffered row goes dark the moment the belt stops, which means the miner powering the belt also goes dark, and now you have a plant that cannot restart itself.

That failure mode is genuinely unpleasant to recover from, and one container prevents it. The same logic applies to the water side, where a Fluid Buffer serves the same purpose.

Common mistakes

Sizing coal correctly and forgetting water. 45 m³/min each adds up fast.

Running eight generators off one Mk.1 pipe. 360 m³/min needed, 300 available.

Assuming overclocking generators costs an exponent. They are linear. It is the production buildings that are not.

Building the plant far from water. Belt the coal, not the water.

Connecting a big new load immediately. Let the plant reach output first.