I am adoring this mod and playing it continuously for a few weeks, now. I love seeing all the low-tech wooden versions of everything like the wooden assembly belts. Seeing a trees biodome on a space platform is also just rad.

I have a question about power. When you first land, you use local resources, with dessication being the neatest one. What about when you leave and come back, and can start importing tech and resources from other planets?

Here are my thoughts.

1. Keeping the dessication running seems reasonable to generate some steam, but it won't be enough to run real electrical equipment. I like keeping as much as the original base going an possible, though, because it gives a base a really neat look to it. It is like modern-day Rome, where you see mostly modern stuff but have these pockets of ancient stuff. If you do keep the dessicators going, I think it is good to circuit control your more primary steam production so that the dessicators always have buffer space to emit their steam.

2. Having a small solar array makes things more forgiving, because while you are building out, if you derp something up, you will always have SOME power to get things to inch along.

3. Nuclear seems like the inevitable later-game choice. I am thinking to switch to fission before long but wanted to experiment with alternatives before making the leap. I like the idea of at least trying to use local sources for power generation, if nothing else for the challenge of it. Fission seems simple though and to not nee too much import of urianium products. Fusion, for sure, blows everything else away, for anything you bother scaling up further once you have it.

4. You can burn peat in boilers. Peat mainly comes from pete mines, though, and I'm not sure how well those mines will last and will need replinishing. Also, I presume it makes a lot of noise, though, again, I'm not sure how much it ends up mattering in practice so long as you keep up with your noise responses--walls, noise cancellers, tree farms. (FWIW, I am intrigued about the noise cancellers but have always liked the vibe of tree farms as a pollution sink once they added them to the game. Fun to have a new way to do it, though!)

5. You can make and burn rocket fuel. I believe this is also downstream of peat, but it may be a little more efficient.

6. You can make and burn wood products, either wood directly or carbon. This is intruiging to me for it being truly renewable. I haven't played with it yet, though, because I still had a peat mine from the early game and am just using that for now.

What are other people doing?

Nice you are having fun.
I just put down a nuclear plant and called it a day 🙃
Solar is a very good option too. I think growing wood for electricity isn't such a good idea. But prove me wrong.
Peat patches are small but many. With big miners and mining productivity you can use them for electricity without a second thought.

I ended up doing the same with nuclear. I think I may have even switched to fusion.

A funny thing I found is that as you use less steam and less peat, then any belt with peat on it can start to back up, leading to cascading issues with gold and gold stromatite getting starved. I think I used recyclers to solve that once I noticed.

I also ended up spamming noise cancellers once I got a new power source installed so that their power drain does not seem excessive. There ends up being very little noise pollution escaping the main plant after doing so. Nice!

It sounds fun to try doing a peat-based in a future run just to see. I found the power needs to not be astronomical even when getting up to a few thousand science/minute, and there are noise cancellers for dealing with whatever pollution the peat burning causes.

Also use walls to reduce noise. They don't need energy. I like to combine noth.