Your favorite way of generating power that is not nuclear?

After I chose windmill, I realised that geothermal can now accept BuildCraft pipes, which is what I'll go for next time I start a new world.

Quote from _Tim_

After I chose windmill, I realised that geothermal can now accept BuildCraft pipes, which is what I'll go for next time I start a new world.

REPRESENT!!!

Liquid energy = best energy

I recently decided to supplement my solars with geothermal, as I had a ravine nearby with a lava lake inside it. I pumped the lava up to 2 geos, when I realized I needed a few more as the lava was piling up. I ended up with 7 geos all being fed, pumping some serious power. I will always use geothermal from now on.

There is no best answer; however I tend to prefer looking for interactions between the mods I have installed and abusing them to either provide free energy or amplify energy in one by using it to enhance the efficiency of another.

For SSP I've more or less realized that the easiest path (with mods now installed) is either abusing RP2 + watermills OR geogens and fabricating fuel via EE.

Buildcraft pumps + geogens sounds like a good option if you know you have it; but it doesn't last nearly as long as you want the way I tend to mine... at least not without pumping the nether instead (which you then need to generate over there and take back in energy crystals one way or another).

I normally have one of everything (exept nuclear) and have 8 Geo plants. I normally find HUGE lava lakes at layers 0-19 so I set up a BC pipe grid and many tanks to store lava incase the lake is drained or the engine goes BOOM

For a BC-type alternative, Forestry Biogas+Charcoal engines also come into a close 2nd with me as most of the material costs are highly renewable, and using a series of standard generators alongside bio-generators creates quite a large yield in energy as well. Course, you do need a start grid of energy beforehand, but that's only a small initial investment to deal with until your system can almost sustain itself on it's own energy, lol...

Forestry is really cool if you want fully renewable power generation.

I'm currently playing in a legit world, with IC2, BC3, BC/IC crossover, Forestry, logistic pipes (and some other unrelated mods).

I have a fully automated, self sustaining setup with 2 peat bogs, a wheat farm, 2 tree farms (one with rubber trees) and 2 apiaries.

Everything forestry-related runs on peat-fired engines, those 2 bogs are enough for everything and some peat is left over.

Excess wood is converted into charcoal then burned in 4 generators together with excess peat producing constant 40 eu/t.

Then all the saplings are shoved into 2 fermenters -> 1 still to produce biofuel (the one in forestry, not the one in IC2). The fuel is used to power 3 combustion engines for the fermenter/still setup, 6 combustion engines for lasers (BC assembly table) and 4 engines feeding power to a petrochemical generator (BC/IC crossover mod) producing ~12.5eu/t each... and then i still have some leftover lol. All the cooling for those engines is handled with 3 BC pumps powered by peat engines.

So the current setup produces ~90eu/t being fully self-sufficient and renewable.
If i switched those extra 6 engines running an assembly table to EU production i could get ~165eu/t.

Side rant:

I used to use solars like other people.....

Until they got really nerfed.

I use redpower and watergens for my prefered LV system.

Yo can use a deployer to fill a bucket from a water source then use a filter behind it to pull only filled buckets and send them to the water mills via tubes.

Finally use a retreiver connected to the tube network to pull only empty buckets from the water mills and put them back into the deployer.

Connected it all with Tin cable and you have a system that can feed about 12 watermills, this equals 24 EU/t.

The exact same system can also feed buckets of water into a reactor.

Same here, water+RP2. Cheap, efficient, could be placed anywhere.

Geothermal.

When possible, the APS mod fusion generator feeding into a bank of bc-ic crossover mod power converters. makes for a worthwhile long-term goal, and is awesome looking when set up.

• Solar panels: too low output to resource input ratio for my liking (and low output EU overall)
• Water mills: too low output for my liking, and I don't like to make the RP2/water mill set-up
• Wind mills: ok output, I use a few at beginning to power my machine room (no maintenance, unless you make it really high, which I don't), I keep them unless/until I change bases
• Generators: use at very beginning (who doesn't?), but I don't like the input maintenance and output to use it as mass production
• Geothermal generators: good output, I use in conjunction with BC and teleport pipes (not sure if it is being maintained anymore), I just pump every little lava lake I find back to my base into a tank storage system to be outputed (correct spelling?) to my geothermal generators, it's amazing how much lava you can get if you gather all that you find in your travels
• Add-ons: with forestry, you can set up automatic farms that you can use their biological outputs to create biomass, which you can use in bio-generators to create energy; you can also use IC2-BC crossover mod (there are many mods that convert IC2 and BC power back and forth, search for the one you want) to turn oil or fuel into EU

Overall, I would use (to power a mass fabricator) geothermal (with other mods), forestry renewable energy, and BC oil/fuel (crossover mods)

Right now on my SMP server one would find a very good mix of power sources. This server uses IC2, BC, RP, Forestry, Railcraft, and Additional pipes.

Lava is my primary fuel source for both my BC and Forestry engines. Biofuel (Forestry) going straight to to bio-engines to convert it to EU, BC Fuel used to power any quarries or fillers using combustion engines and teleport pipes.

Geo= My go to for new starts, but also supplemental power right up until Nuclear. I generally strip must maps clean of lava around my main bases for many many chunks.

Wind= If my base is near 100 I'll build a respectable farm, I like the high constant yield and the chance of these to "burning out"

Water= used in many situations to even include main power for smaller satellite bases.

Solar= vary rarely used, since I only sleep once to set bind and generally play on SMP, they are just too useless for my taste.

BioFuel (IC fuel cans) = used in most most mid-tier bases as a power boost, depending on the output of my farms.

Generators = never used at the start of a base, only used in conjunction with excess wood (as charcoal) from Forestry.

Biofuel (Forestry) = my go to supplemental power through out the life of my main bases.

Cross over mods= I find ALL of them besides Forestry to be way over powered. I won't even install them on my SMP server.

Even back in IC1 I would use a mix of geo, solar, and wind. I never like to depend on any one source.

Quote from SpwnX

I like windmills for power as they generate a constant energy without the need to feed any fuel.
I have a setup with 1600 windmills using 32x20x32 (XYZ) generating 2k-6kEu/t

I will need to try this tomorrow, SpwnX. How do you transfer the power from the windmills, down to your base or wherever else? I admit I'm a newb.

Quote from sirbrandino

I recently decided to supplement my solars with geothermal, as I had a ravine nearby with a lava lake inside it. I pumped the lava up to 2 geos, when I realized I needed a few more as the lava was piling up. I ended up with 7 geos all being fed, pumping some serious power. I will always use geothermal from now on.

The reason why I love a buildcraft pump attached to a geothermal, is because there is no maintenance involved. I do occasionally have to flip a lever to refill one of the tanks, or pump from the tanks into the geo, but apart from that I can completely forget about it, which I consider wonderful.

Using BC, RP2 and an automatic crafting table and those wonderful power converters you can set up an automatic lava cell refiller in the nether. Obviously, find a lava source. There might be a couple there. Geothermal generator to converter running a BC pump, attached directly to the pump. This will feed it lava directly without needing those messy pipes.

Run a pipe to a stack of 2-3 tanks or attach those directly to the pump as well. Redstone deployer takes buckets of lava from the tank, restone filter pipes it to a chest filled with empty cells. Yay tin!

Automatic crafting table (fed with the recipe and powered by a redstone engine) will fill the lava cell as soon as the ingredients are available. Redstone engines pump the cells out of the crafting table into a receiving chest, a filter sends the empty bucket back to the deployer.

Wire all of this together with a redstone sequencer (I prefer to use 2 engines for the removal of the filled cells so I can run it twice as fast and keep the engines and the filters/deployer on separate circuits) and it's fully automatic. Edited to add this: Running the engines on a sequencer, staggered so they don't cycle at the same time, will double output and the engines will never overheat. They won't even turn green.

You have to attend it for a bit since it won't run on a chunkloader thanks to the nether being a separate world but it fills the cells pretty fast and it can be nearly risk free if you enclose the entire mess in a cobblestone housing.

I know it sounds a bit complicated but producing a lava cell every second or so while you refill your charging station or whatever you have set up there to keep you occupied for 5 minutes can save you a lot of cave crawling searching for new sources of lava.

If I hadn't lost my savegame in a corruption I'd take a screenie of my setup. It was pretty sweet and extremely useful since I lived underground. Solar falls apart when your floor is at 15.