"Refreshing" a power plant

[Reid Lockhart 0]

Okay. So, we all have that time when a power plant is "no spring chicken".

Is this a bug when I repalce the plant and the new one comes in with nearly zero funding?  Is there a way to do this without it being a risk of ruining my entire city?

I pause, destroy the old plant, and put the new one in.  If I forget to check the funding, which is almost ALWAYS the case as I play like, once every two months, the new one causes a bunch of no-power across the entire city. This results in not only people moving out, but it starts a wave of water outages as well, and by the time I have it all caught up, several of my sims have moved out.

Of course, the biggest problem with this is that when the new sims move in, they're fresh sims.  They need to have kids again, which need to go through the school systems and re-educate.  This means that they're too dumb initially to fill the $$ and $$$ jobs, so all my commercial and high tech industry drops, and the high tech industry replaces itself with dirty industry in the middle of my commercial/residential areas...etc

you get the point.  How do I avoid this?

[astronelson 339]

If you have another power plant with low funding, this will happen. Usually this happens when people have a garbage to power incinerator running at low funding. Any new power plant will take the average of the others. So if you have a few garbage incinerators, all at zero funding, and a power plant at maximum funding, a new power plant will automatically have very low funding.

If this is what is causing your problems, either putting your garbage incinerators in a different city or using different forms of garbage disposal may do the trick (I recommend Pegasus' garbage chute, from the STEX).

[Reid Lockhart 0]

You answer is pure genius.  That explains excactly why the funding is at such a low percentage but not zero.  It's matching the percentage of my waste plant.

Thank you!