This game is promising, I've already discussed an issue with Mac OS X but otherwise I liked the gameplay. Since the goal of this game is to help others understand how the power grid works I have a couple of suggestions that I think would make gameplay more interesting and realistic.
In an actual power grid the power company monitors the system frequency. The system frequency will be the same at every node in the grid, and it will decrease when new loads are introduced to the grid and it will increase as power generation increases and loads are removed. Ideally it's kept as close to 60 HZ (in the US) as possible, but the grid has to be protected against situations when the frequency is higher or lower than expected.
In an industrial setting a factory may have polyphase motors they use for manufacturing or some other process. The rotational speed of these motors will be determined by the frequency of the grid, which means they could be damaged if the grid frequency is too low or high. Thus a factory may opt to drop out of the grid if the grid frequency is too low or high. This will cause a blackout in the factory, keeping their equipment safe but causing expensive downtime. It could also a rolling blackout if other factories have similar protections because the grid frequency will increase in response to the missing load. Transformers for substations also have frequency protections.
Currently the goal of your game is to produce more power than is demanded, but I think this is a bit misleading because electrical power is conserved; the amount of power generated is exactly the same as the amount consumed! Of course you will have transmission losses but if you add the amount of power lost during transmission with the amount of power your customers consume you'll find that it's equal to the amount of power your power plants produced. (Describing how this is possible is difficult without understanding the differences between reactive and resistive power, unless you have a background in electrical engineering as I do)
My proposal is replacing the "energy consumed" meter with a frequency dial and making the goal of the game to keep the dial as close to 60 Hz as possible. (50 Hz if you live outside the Americas or southern Japan) The player will still need to produce enough power to meet demand, keeping the frequency above a cutoff, but the dial will also discourage the player from producing too much power as this will raise the frequency above the desired 60 Hz and also cause blackouts. This will supplement the player's priority on using fewer resources and cheaply generating electricity with keeping the lights on.
My second suggestion was replacing the graph of power demand with a forecast of power consumption 24 hours in advance. Later in the game you could supplement this with a forecast for wind and solar energy production. This will help the player decide when they need to fire up their coal, natural gas and nuclear power plants.
Other ideas;
- Selling/buying power from other grids
- Downtime for maintenance preventing the use of one of your power generators
- Bribing city councilors into raising taxes to pay for your multi-million dollar boondoggles even though you're not in a co-op with them. (I'm mostly kidding here. Mostly.)