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[Sutremaine]

Both in terms of generated power and final output. I think I saw one on the map archive that was about 3000 power, but searching doesn't turn up anything useful.

[Efun]

Ehh... about 17 wheels, 1700 power to use on.... 4 pumps.... i like overkill

[Fossaman]

I think my biggest was...5000 power or so? That sounds about right. It was powering something like five banks of pumps as wide as the waterwheel section, draining a lake.

[Peewee]

I unfortunately don't recall how much power, but I wanted to see how much power I could get from a brook, so I filled the whole thing with water wheels to see.

[Sukasa]

64 waterwheels in an old power plant fort.  It exploded spectaularly due to the water pressure bug.

[yuhhaur]

I dug up a 3tile wide channel to divert the water stream away from a brook and pump it 12 z-level up into my fortress for various purposes. The channel, installed with 15 x 3 = 45 water wheels producing output of 4500 are connected to the screw pumps consuming 12 x 3 = 36 pumps x 10 = 360 + some gear assemblies & axles = about 500.

Is that overkilled?

[Itnetlolor]

This sounds like a challenge.

Anyone willing to make a massive power station?

Channel out a series of mini-rivers from a main river, fill them with nothing but WWs, and install a massive water-tower building recycling flowing water from all levels (perpetual generator with at least 3 floors-worth of flow.) in similar fashion to the mini-river setup.

Be sure to also have it corkscrew upward, and overflow into an aqueduct full of WWs, and let it release back into the river, or into a BP or chasm. Provided enough effort; one could possibly make it to 1.21 Gigawatts.

Be sure to charge tons of platinum for this modern power station to surrounding civs.

[Efun]

Elffie McTreehugger: "WHAT!!! I don't even USE power!!"

Urist McTaxCollector: "Too bad..."

[The Laughing Man]

5700 Power generated with about 1600 total draw.  Roughly 1000 went to draining my fortress using 3 pumps (and associated axles, gear assemblies) per level over about 16 levels to put all the water back into my aquifer.  I had multiple waterfalls throughout the fort and had an experimental system for periodically flooding the refuse stockpile as a method of automatically clearing room for new waste.  It worked well except that it would occasionally drain haulers into the holding pit for refuse which was barred off to prevent dwarves from taking the refuse back from the sewers to the stockpile.  (Though the system required very active drainage and would still cause minor flooding in the lower workshop levels every time it went off)
The other 600 went to my doomsday flooding device, which would've eventually taken most of the remaining spare power except after the first test run I found that it killed my fps faster than it killed orcs.  (brought me down to 4 fps in under a minute)

[Martin]

The Dwarf Heaven green glass fortress in my sig has a power plant with 272 water wheels. Disengaged from the pump stacks, they require 3380 power just to be idle. When fully powered, it should produce approximately 21,000 surplus power beyond the needs of the water and magma pump ladders.

There's a vertical drive shaft going the entire height of the fortress that can be tapped off of at will.

Ehh... about 17 wheels, 1700 power to use on.... 4 pumps.... i like overkill

You have no idea what overkill is.

[Duke 2.0]

 Idea:
 A power station, which consists of two channels for water on top of eachother. Water flows over the top channel and powers waterwheels, until the water flows out a hole at the end into the bottom channel. Then pumps pump the water out the opposite end to finish the system.

 Sounds typical, but imagine this elongated for the entire map, filling a few z-levels. Can you imagine the power? We could land a dwarf on the Moon. We could pick the fortress up and move it around. We could unify the whole dwarven empire under a single power grid of axles. We shall rise into an industrial revolution We shall be unified. We shall be strong.

[smjjames]

Yea, now we just need to use it in applications OTHER than moving magma/water around and occasionally for mills.

I wonder if it will work if we use a waterfall and harness the energy coming from there.

[Itnetlolor]

Yea, now we just need to use it in applications OTHER than moving magma/water around and occasionally for mills.

I wonder if it will work if we use a waterfall and harness the energy coming from there.

Reason I included the aqueduct idea, alog with building upwards with a building.

The ground floor would power the upward flow, and from the very top flowing downward, powers the WWs below each floor, keeping them full and flowing, meeting up with an aqueduct to recycle the process. This can keep the power-grid in a compressed enough area to allow powering megaprojects as well.

Oddly enough, I don't see the first step (building the grid) too much of an undertaking. Aside from wood collecting and building the tower for the grid. The taller, the better however. More grids per Z.

[Martin]

The wood cost is non-trivial. 800 trees just for mine, but other than that, it scales pretty easily.

[Sutremaine]

When fully powered, it should produce approximately 21,000 surplus power beyond the needs of the water and magma pump ladders.

Now that's what I'm talking about. I planned out a 36x36 spiral area filled with waterwheels (except for one space I just noticed. Damn, damn, damn) and with a pump tower space enclosed, but I didn't want to undertake such a pointlessly large project if it wasn't superlatively pointlessly large.

It isn't as efficient as yours (I suppose you're using a giant swimming pool bridged with waterwheels, or something similar?), but it should power itself. The six-waterwheel model I made to test the design powered up as it was being filled, and I see no reason why it wouldn't scale.