PCU vs Energy vs ALTS

The energy output of a single reactor is 300 MWH for 25 pcu.

For wind and solar, the PCU is 55 pcu. And the output is mere kilowatts.

On large servers, well organized guilds regularly bypass the pcu limit through the practice of having alts. This effectively makes pcu nothing more than a marketing play at best, or at worst an incentive for players to make cross server pcu swap trades.

And at the same time, keen has failed to introduce widespread modular systems to tackle the pcu glut problem.

The problem at its core is that each block that players place has to run individual calculations, instead of aggregate calculations. The one exception to this entire system are speed modules. Here, refineries and assemblers can have their stats tweaked by adding on a few blocks. These add ins dramatically increase pcu efficiency to the point that people build less refineries than they would have otherwise.

The system of speed modules should be expanded to other blocks in the game. For example, late game solar could have the solar panel redesigned to have solar modules that could be added to the solar panel and increase its power output and size tremendously, without actually increasing the compute costs so drastically.

Late game wind could feature a wind turbine shaft that could have modules installed all along it, to decrease the cost of a wind turbine farm from 1200 pcu to 55 pcu.

Large grid gyros could have gyro slots that increase their power and size. Same for batteries, and even thrusters.

With such changes, pcu would be less of an issue. People would naturally want to build these more pcu efficient systems, because it would be space efficient, and while the pcu cap would still exist it would be taken more seriously, not a thing to be actively countered through making alts, doing cross server pcu trades, and other shenanigans.