Today, I was reading through the water mill wiki, and immediately noticed that the design posted is far from being efficient. My first thought was that by placing the water mills so close together, you lose 0.02 EU per tick. This number, by itself, is utterly minute and as a value totally worthless. But, when you're dealing with each generator producing .25 EU a tick, or in this case, .23EU a tick, it can add up once your numbers start getting a little high. By placing a cable between the central power line (or batbox) and the water mill, you get that extra .02EU/tick.
This led to the next thought. Why run them in a string? Why not a web? Since cables deal with packets and not total EU, you can actually hook up as many green generators as you want to a tin cable, as none of generate power exceeding 5EU a tick (solar and water are far less than that). You're only limited to wire length. Taking this into consideration, with water mills, you can run a tin cable that stretches 37 blocks long. From here, with a central energy container (batbox/MFE/MFSU), you can create the following shape (when grey=tin cable and red=energy container):
With this layout, you can easily place a layer of 684 water mills on the top, and 685 water mills on the bottom, when you place the water mills with 1 cable between them and the central 'plate'. That is 171EU a tick from the top water mills, and an additional 171.25EU a tick form the underneath water mills.
But wait! There's more! By replacing top water mills with solar panels, you get considerable more coverage, and are still able to place water mills on the bottom. In addition to this, you can move the power storage (you're going to want and MFSU to emit the energy fast enough) to the bottom of the plate. With this set up, you would be generating 2813EU a tick from just solar panels, plus the 171 from the water mills. Basically, attach this to a mass fabricator, and you'll never worry about having the right blocks again. Of coarse, if you have 2813 solar panels laying around, and 684 water mills, you're probably not too worried anyways.
If you're totally opposed to solar panels, this is THE way to optimally design your wiring for water mills. None of this non-optimal efficiency garbage that is posted to the wiki. The design isn't totally minecraft-y though, so the next easiest thing would be a square of wire with a width of 37, a gap of 1 around it, and water pouring from the ceiling. The wire design would like like this, if grey=wire and red=batbox
This is a stylized design but still uses the least possible wire. Out of a design like this, you would get 324 water mills, or 81 EU/tick (649 water mills and 92.25 EU/tick including bottom half).With this, you would still need an MFE just to pull the power out of storage as quickly as you generate it.
I hope this was informative to newer members, and at least an entertaining idea to the older members. The first design is by no means practical, but rather aims to be extremely efficient. The second design is far more practical, but still quite large. My thinking goes that as the game goes on and you are building larger and larger generator fields, you still want the most bang for your buck, which means that your fields will have to be designed more and more efficiently. As it stands, its utterly futile to use any wires besides tin and fiber optic to design any large scale power fields efficiently, especially with green energy when every EU is valuable.
