Hi! I haven't tried the mod yet, just some thoughts off the top of my head:

Turbines near a lot of buildings/tree/ore may not work at all!

While I agree that (potentially high) buildings and trees may interfere with how wind turbines work, I'm not sold on ore doing the same thing. Is that just an arbitrary restriction set up by you to make the game more challenging? Also, does this refer to just vanilla ores, or also to new ores introduced by other mods?

Turbines work best when in open areas, especially near water.

Guess what, there is plenty of space in open areas on water, that's why they build offshore wind parks! :-)

I like to play with Cargo Ships. This mod makes even deep water accessible by boat or ship. It also provides floating electric poles covering long distances (just like the big electric poles from vanilla do on land). Wouldn't it be a good idea to allow for offshore wind turbines (research locked behind "Oversea energy distribution" from Cargo Ships) that could be connected to the floating electric poles if Cargo Ships is also active?

Last time I tried to play with wind power, I used the Texugo Wind Generator. That was still with Factorio 0.16.51, and I haven't kept track of that mod because when I played with it, it seemed to put a heavy load on UPS (the mod used fluid mechanics to simulate the wind power). How is your mod in this regard -- if I happen to plop down several wind parks with, say, a hundred turbines each, will UPS drop?

I'd like to use an additional power source (i.e., wind power) in my game, but I'm afraid that it would make the game virtually unplayable after some time. So, please convince me that my concerns are unfounded! :-D

Pi-C, yes any ore will affect turbine performance, not just normal ones. I added this restriction (and the boost from nearby water) for an increased realistic- experience. Typically wind farms are out on their own without obstruction. The game has built in "wind" but it's cosmetic and shouldn't be relied on IMO.

I based this mod (loosely) on Texugo Wind Generator but that was mostly for the graphics cause I'm not a graphics person. I got some further inspiration from KS Power on how to handle the actual power generation. These windmills don't use any fluid mechanics to simulate power, they work in a similar fashion to the energy source that you get in cheat mode. Again with obstructions and water, what I wanted to do was to avoid just getting a static amount of "free" power, and encourage people to further optimize their wind farms by finding the best place to put them. I was trying to fit this in somewhere after solar but before nuclear to give another option in between. Each turbine can generate anywhere from no power to a theoretical 375kw under maximum conditions which includes a night-time bonus of up to 25% to help offset solar generation at night.

I'm not sure about the UPS, but I did my best to ensure I wasn't doing anything too strenuous. Feel free to give i a whirl and I'll do my best to adjust if needed :)

Thanks for your reply (and fixing the crash)!

Pi-C, yes any ore will affect turbine performance, not just normal ones.

Good to know! By the way, would railway infrastructure (rails, signals, train stops) or combinators also count as buildings?

Again with obstructions and water, what I wanted to do was to avoid just getting a static amount of "free" power, and encourage people to further optimize their wind farms by finding the best place to put them.

So, there's no chance for offshore wind generators? :-)

Each turbine can generate anywhere from no power to a theoretical 375kw under maximum conditions which includes a night-time bonus of up to 25% to help offset solar generation at night.

So you would need fewer accumulators?

I'm not sure about the UPS, but I did my best to ensure I wasn't doing anything too strenuous. Feel free to give i a whirl and I'll do my best to adjust if needed :)

OK, I'll try. My game is processing slowly, however, so it will probably take a while until I can give you feedback (unless I'm hit by another bug).

Anything that's placed on the ground can affect performance. The only things that's ignored are power poles and substations.

Off-shore wind generators may be a possibility, i don't like requiring dependencies in my mods, but I may be able to detect if another mod is installed and have a 2nd version of the windmill present... we'll see :)

Yeah that's the idea is to need fewer accumulators possibly, just to give you more flexibility in your base design.

Off-shore wind generators may be a possibility, i don't like requiring dependencies in my mods,

You can make it an optional dependency by adding "? cargo-ships" to the "dependencies" line of info.json. This wouldn't require anybody to install Cargo Ships, but if that mod is active, the dependency will enforce that it is loaded before your mod. In that manner, you can act on all recipes, entities etc. introduced by the mod depended on, and you can make sure that the other mod won't overwrite your settings.

but I may be able to detect if another mod is installed

Detecting another mod is quite easy: In control.lua, you would use

if game.active_mods["cargo-ships"] then … end

In the other LUA files it would be

if mods["cargo-ships"] then … end

Coming up with the 2nd version of the windmill would be a bit more work, I guess. But I sure would be glad if you could do it! :-)

built-in offshore generators would be awesome, but we can get by with a small bit of landfill and the large floating poles