Town + Powerlines?

Realistic, cheapest and intended way would be to use HV cables to every house and step it down there.

If you want loseless transfer use fiber cables and either MFSUs (gives you extra buffer to prevent brown-outs in case of high load) or HV transformers as repeaters.
I would place the plant in the middle of the city and put a cable under every street, easy access and you reach every house. Need to keep an eye on the overall capacity of the line tho. If using fiber all stations can only draw 512 EU/t combined, fine for 10 ppl on one line, but 20 is already too much. You can use HV lines, gives you a lot more power, but you also lose a lot more.

Quote from catt0

Realistic, cheapest and intended way would be to use HV cables to every house and step it down there.

If you want loseless transfer use fiber cables and either MFSUs (gives you extra buffer to prevent brown-outs in case of high load) or HV transformers as repeaters.
I would place the plant in the middle of the city and put a cable under every street, easy access and you reach every house. Need to keep an eye on the overall capacity of the line tho. If using fiber all stations can only draw 512 EU/t combined, fine for 10 ppl on one line, but 20 is already too much. You can use HV lines, gives you a lot more power, but you also lose a lot more.

Mostly this... IF you actually start pursuing this endeavor, you can begin to see why our RL power lines are the way that they are, as you encounter tons of losses down the line and logistic issues when that one creeper blows up in the right spot and knocks out people on half your grid... lol

Bury your power lines underground or a couple metres in the air. Save you some headache, even though it might take a bit longer. Looks prettier though.

A central powerplant is not the only thing you should have. Some local transformation-stations should be used too. And obviously they should work as entrance to the underground part where all the wiring is placed.

A problem could be the size of the city. You need to ensure that the whole city is loaded.

I am curently building somthing simular on a server.
We have the powerstation in the middle, and then EV cables going to south, west, east and North.
If you limit the max lenght to about 200 blocks each way you ok loss.

Then when someone wan't to connect to the powerline they just digg down to the powerline and hook up a HV transformer to the powercable. Works great, if you have wireless redstone you can hookup EU detektor cables too, so you can see who is drawing power.
I suggest you try a small scale before you try on a server if you are going to do that

If you bury them cover them with R-stone so creepers dont destroy your hard earned cables and transformers.

Small reality check, who will be consuming your power and how will they be consuming it? Minecraft doesn't actually have lights, vacuum cleaners and pool filters that need power like a real town would. I think it's a lovely idea but I fear that you may be wasting plenty of resources and effort to run power to a house that no one lives in. If it's providing power to other players on your server, wouldn't they rather make their own power?

Quote from xenoflot

Small reality check, who will be consuming your power and how will they be consuming it? Minecraft doesn't actually have lights, vacuum cleaners and pool filters that need power like a real town would. I think it's a lovely idea but I fear that you may be wasting plenty of resources and effort to run power to a house that no one lives in. If it's providing power to other players on your server, wouldn't they rather make their own power?

While this is true, what's the point of autonomy when you can specialize and proficiently divide the cost-and-labor with those who enjoy doing it? If it's a city with players creating around it, then idk why you'd have tons and tons of generator devices consuming space left and right when you can conserve space and develop a power grid network... That way, the server feels more fun constructively and people would feel more likely to contribute to the grid and such due to both personal and interpersonal investments..

Sounds like fun to me at least, lol...

Edit: Got ninja'ed by a cat, lol...

Quote from SpwnX

The realistic way is a city have a powerplant, and distribute energy to all people living in it. Since when everyone have generators to power your stuff in RL?

You're correct for a situation in which resources are finite and you're not building stuff for the fun of building!

Your point about a town scenario where people are on small plots does make sense though. I run a private server with only 5 of us so worldguard and political boundaries are not necessary

Quote from SpwnX

I have built once a powerplant with 1600 wind gens and powerlines on a server, using the energy transfer system i posted above. (solar panels are HV array for testing)
If you have a server i can join i could build it again

haha thanks but no. I'm not sure that my server could handle the lag of 1600 wind gens It's only a core2duo with 2G RAM.

... unless of course you weren't talking to me...

Actually renewable is your best friend.
What we really need is location based power, for example special areas where you could run real geothermal power generators, or solar panels producing twice or three times as much EU in certain Biomes.

That way people get cheaper EUs if they draw power from a desert solar plant but they may wish to live in a forest, thus they have to have power lines.

The simple fact is that EU must be cheaper to generate out of the persons home, that way it can have a profit margin to pay back for the infrastructure. Imagine if Finite Liquid was integrated with MC Forge, real water power anyone? With that done then it would be ridiculously cheap to run hydro electrical power but it would have to be built on a river, meaning you would have to have either one dam per person or to have a power grid (which could be expanded to other dams as well)>

Here's an idea: How about you save yourself some wiring trouble and just have a building say every 2 or 3 city blocks that has energy-o-mats inside (think laundromat for power instead of washing clothes) and then people just hook up there stuff for when they need power.

Here's an alternative idea: build a grid underneath the road with occasional centralized power storage stations for sudden increases in demand, then, build a wire to every house and hook it up to an energy-o-mat, that way you make the people pay for the electricity (good for making money and making sure power isn't wasted) and you deliver power for them.

Note: Truth be told, if available under the conditions, I'd go with the second one. The first one is good for large cities, or when you don't have time to build a super complex infrastructure.

I'm figuring out how to make a city/town with central power gen/storage, streetlights, and everything for my world megaproject. I know, very DF-ish, the idea of a megaproject. Say, do you think a building in a urban environment looks better made out of stone or stone brick?

Quote from bbqroast

Actually renewable is your best friend.
What we really need is location based power, for example special areas where you could run real geothermal power generators, or solar panels producing twice or three times as much EU in certain Biomes.

That way people get cheaper EUs if they draw power from a desert solar plant but they may wish to live in a forest, thus they have to have power lines.

The simple fact is that EU must be cheaper to generate out of the persons home, that way it can have a profit margin to pay back for the infrastructure. Imagine if Finite Liquid was integrated with MC Forge, real water power anyone? With that done then it would be ridiculously cheap to run hydro electrical power but it would have to be built on a river, meaning you would have to have either one dam per person or to have a power grid (which could be expanded to other dams as well)>

Firstly, apologies for double post, but I don't know how to multiquote. Now to the actual response.

Actually, renewables are pretty bad for urban environments due to the enormous amounts of space they require to produce meaningful amounts of power. I prefer nuke reactors because of their amazing power density (A basic Mark 1 with no chambers produces 8 EU/t, or equal to 8 solar panels. A large number of Mk I power plants can power an entire city out of a single plot due to their amazing power density. Granted, they require significant maintenance, but trade-offs. Now, if solar panels drew 3 EU/t, the ratio would improve.

In addition, the high resource cost of nuclear is a point against them, but once it is made, a few MK2-3 powerplants can power an entire city. For optimal resource efficiency, Mark 2.

Of course, solar panels do have a role as supplemental power, but the role is just that: supplemental.

Granted, nonrenewable power plants require large resource input for power generation, but this is, of course, the price paid for their space efficiency.

The best power plant for a given city depends on available resources for power generation in that city. Cities with large uranium reserves should use nuclear, those with large lava reserves, geothermal, and those with neither, standard, fueled with either coalfuel or charcoal.

Wind Gens can produce a goodly amount of power for not a lot of space if you're willing to make big towers of them. If you have Advanced Machines then small arrays of MV and HV solar can produce way more power than you need.