I've seen talk about reed power, largely made popular by the yogcast. But many people have over looked that cactus produces the same energy as reeds, but with cactus you can have a completely automatic farm without complex redstone and because of the fact that if cactus grows to the next block up and these an adjacent block then it breaks of to form a cactus item.
In my farm I use water to move the cactus to a single point and then ( i have buildcraft too) use an odisdian pipe to pick them up, I then feed it in to a generator to produce energy. And because its completely automatic It will run with no babysitting.
But to go one step more, by taking the exsess cactus and putting it in to a recycler you can get scrap, which is then turn into a scrap box ( automatic crafting table for this too). And the scrap boxs turn into lots of items including diamond, I useally put the items I dont want back into the recyler.
Cactus farm will work anywhere and doesn't need light to grow. I've build one in the hole left by a buildcraft quary and with my cactus farm just over half the cactus goes to recyclers.
The recyclers randomly produce a peice of scrap with a 1/8 chance and about 1/25 scrap boxses make daimond, with each scrap box holding 9 scrap. so you'll need about 1800 cactus to make one diamond and my farm makes about 75 cactus a minute but half is use to power the recyclers so 37 cactus goes to the recyclers a minute so it takes about 48 minutes to make a diamond this way. now my farm has about 1400 cactus, but I build that in about two hours not increaing the time to mine the hole, you could make it much bigger if you like. I've got a lot (25) of diamond from my cactus farm and plenty of over stuff (cake!). If all the cactus was used for energy then the energy produce per minute will be 9312 EU.
People of IC stop the reed power and start the cactus power!