I find myself burning and flaring ridiculous quantities of benzene as a byproduct of plastic/rubber production. My first thought is that I'd like priority turbines as an easy way to use it for power generation, but I'm also wondering if I'm missing some other pathway to deal with all this benzene.

I think I should have switched over to the plastic recipe that uses BPA, butadiene, styrene, and acrylonitrile to deal with all this benzene, but I still think priority turbines could be useful to flare byproducts instead of just dumping the excess steam in a chimney.

That said, putting together a green belt worth of plastic with all this flared benzene was a fun experiment :-)

That's an interesting thought. If you merely want to dispose of it, then you can just vent the steam in chimneys on an overflow valve in your steam tank. However, it does seem like a shame that you can't use it to charge up your accumulators/surge equipment.

So a priority turbine might make some sense, but I feel like some people are confused about how these power systems work already. Some people think they should use priority electrolyzers for energy storage, if they think of using it for energy storage at all. Some assume that they will be able to actually generate more net power with steam than it took to create it, even though it doesn't make any physical sense. And I think a priority turbine will add more confusion for people who barely understand the current tools. Usually when you get to the point where you are mass producing that much benzene you have your energy situation pretty well sorted out, so venting the steam isn't too big of a big deal.

Maybe priority turbine could be introduced during chemical engineering, by the same tech as combustion chamber 3. People who make it that far should have a good enough handle on how the components work to not get the wrong idea about how to use it. And that's also the level where you're likely to be scaling up chemical production enough to have a growing problem with benzene overproduction.

Benzene is just the tip of the iceberg for priority turbines. If you compress air before air separation, you are likely to end up with a huge supply of compressed nitrogen as a byproduct, and that would be nice to be able to have the option to produce energy with and not just store energy.

Thanks for thinking about, I'm not saying it's necessary but it would be an interesting and useful addition.

Also, I've noticed an odd bug: when I deconstruct medium miner 3 with robots, they turn into medium miner 2 when they get put back into my inventory. This seems to also happen when I deconstruct by hand with right click, I've tested this in a few different setups (in or out of transportation, with or without armor equipped).

I also don't understand Silo power consumption, I have 4 silos running with enough modules that they say 23 MW max power consumption, but they only ever seem to consume a little less than half that amount.

I'll have a fix for the medium miner 3 thing in the next update.

Silos have a separate rate of energy consumption when actually launching a rocket than when producing a rocket. But the game's GUI doesn't really distinguish between that when it displays the energy consumption. The base game rocket silo actually has an even greater difference in energy consumption than Nullius does. So I think this is really just general Factorio feedback.

The latest update adds priority turbines and fixes the medium miner 3 issue.

Priority turbines at last! Thank you very much! Hurray!