I've noticed the following issue in my game:

Current demand for power 7-12 GW

Maximum power capacity of my boiler/steam gen setup = 25GW+
However they nearly never operate past 100MW per steam turbine and my power requirements/satisfaction isn't being met. I have a single Tier 7 boiler + steam generator that should be able to provide 14.7GW of power and it never produces more than 240MW even when the base was starting to crash from lack of power.

Context:
All boilers are fuelled with the water pump that matches their tier for 100% water satisfaction
All boilers have huge supplies of coal in them. Most have 4-5K in them.
Everything is connected up with the relevant/correct/matching tier of pipes.

When the base is running normally I noticed my maximum power capacity of the base as a whole is listed as 13.3GW when looking at the steam engine figures it should be 25GW+

Any idea what's going wrong here?

Edit: One thing I've noticed is that a single T7 steam engine with a direct connection to a T7 boiler only has 100 units of steam in reserve of the 3 MILLION it could have. Maybe T7 boilers aren't able to keep up with T7 steam engines?

Edit 2: I added a SECOND boiler for the single T7 steam engine so it looks like:

T7 Boiler > T7 Steam Engine < T7 Boiler

Now it's doubled it's power output from 240MW to 480MW of the 14.7GW it says it should be able to do. Never goes above 480MW

Edit 3: Is there a max throughput for fluids based on connect points of a machine? As in the T7 boiler/steam has 8 attachment points for the steam per side, is that limited or are direct connections scaled up to? Would I need to have a T7 pipe between the engine and boiler?

Thanks for reading!

It is already mentioned in FAQ:

Q: How can I use the high overtiers of heat exchangers or boilers? I can never feed enough water into them!
A: Yes, that was why I limited how high of them can be selected in versions up to 0.17.2.
But I have created a new mod Schall Pipe Scaling in the mean time. With pipes and pumps also available as overtiers, it is now possible to supply that insane amount of fluid flow! To show how to use those overtier pipes, there are some example designs (with blueprints) on its FAQ section.
So new tiers are unlocked in 0.17.3! They are tested to provide their rated performance.

It is impossible to feed enough water with only vanilla pipe into boilers +4 or above, no matter how pipes are laid.
Vanilla pipes can only support up to boiler +3 to its full capacity.

I had direct connections with no pipes though?

UNLESS having NO pipes defaults the game to using 8x vanilla connections? Yeah big issue was only a small % of the steam from the boiler was getting through to the boilers.

Does this mean my setup needs to go: T7 Boiler > T7 Pipe > T7 Steam Engine > T7 Pipe > T7 Steam Engine
As in a T7 pipe between every machine?

Thanks for the help. Will check the blueprints section you linked!

Edit: Yup seems to be the case! Direct connections makes it the same as the width in squares as if it was a row of vanilla pipes. Ok time to set up the big coal plant :D

Seems no configuration of pipes or pumps seem to work? Still stuck at 240MW max for a T7 steam setup?

If I let the steam build in the T7 pipe I briefly see the steam engine flash up to 5GW for a second before dropping right back to 240MW.

https://imgur.com/a/bSKP5V5 Included an image in case there is something obvious I didn't consider! Thanks

Edit: Issue seems to be the boilers? Regardless of how I set them up they refuse to process more than 8K of water into 8K of steam a second. Not sure what to try as the water pump itself seems to be working fine and both boilers are full with 3M+ water.

Edit 2: To experiment - I hooked up a single steam engine to 3 T7 boilers. It's now producing 720MW of power. Is there some limit to how much coal a second the boilers can process? Seems impossible to get them above 8K of steam generated.

Apart from the buildable pipes, the input/output fluid boxes INSIDE boilers (and other machines) also matter. The "direct" connections are not so direct as what you think. Consider those fluid boxes as each built-in pipe, which is also limited by its specs.
The "height" and "level" of fluid boxes affect the flow rate and throughput a lot.

Many other fluid mods emphasized on the one-way valves, but seem to overlook this much more important mechanism. I am well aware of this, thus implement the whole system (with Schall Pipe Scaling) to make sure everything is correctly scaled, to get machines work at designed capacities.
With Schall Pipe Scaling, you do not need any special setup. Just use the same tier of pipes and machines, then things will work. They function just like vanilla ones.

New image to show that everything is T7 and connected.

https://imgur.com/a/6dLIfdi

To clarify: This is for coal generators not nuclear

Do I need to use another fuel maybe? This system should work right? My first image was all T7 pipes/pumps too and it was stuck at 8K steam per boiler max.

Edit: Using solid fuel raises a T7s boiler steam generating ability from 8000 to 24000. Is it related to how I'm using the fuel? Direct insertion or inserts doing it yields the same result. 8K max with coal and 24K max steam with solid fuel.

Oh, I see the problem now. There is a limit on how much fuel item can be consumed per tick.
Tested on Boiler +7, output rate of steam:
- Wood: 4 k/s steam
- Coal: 8 k/s steam
- Solid fuel: 24 k/s steam
- Rocket fuel: 200 k/s steam
- Nuclear fuel: 983 k/s steam (Max)

So higher grade of fuel is needed for the ultra-fast boilers.

Solution: For others reading this - Download this mod https://mods.factorio.com/mod/SimpleCompress

In the startup settings use 300 vanilla ore to 1 compressed ore as the figure and set the MJ fuel value to 300x
Disable plates/intermediate pressing if you want to keep your UI clean [if you only want it for fuel purposes]

This allows you to even use coal to power the huge coal boilers and you can configure the mod to be more balanced by making it 400 coal to 1 compressed but only yield 300x more power per item for example.

Yup just reached the same conclusion!

Thought: Would it be possible to have some kind of setup with recipe scaling that could work with these boilers?
Or a new recipe where 100 coal = 1 coal fuel that per unit has 800k/s of burning power?