[Suggestion] EU Counter

you could actuall already engineer this. first off you could set like 10 MFSUs in a row and then that would make a 100million EU feed supply, when a player needs to buy more power then they can pay you, you check to see how much is left in the battery line, then you go to a splitter cable and turn it on to refill their battery and charge them accordingly. if they are using more then 100million a day or per week then they can pay you to upgrade their storage limit, say by 50 million per a set amount.then all you'd need to do is att 5 more MFSU's in the line or stack then and wire them together so that it drains evenly. it's pretty easy to accomplish. and as for how much power your house is making/receiving, you cna use the EU Detector. i use it on my house everytime i upgrade my power system on my house, currently which is at 7,560 EU/t

Quote from Norisak

How can you use a detector cable to see how much power your mass fabricator has ever consumed?
As for your method of using energy storage blocks to sell power, it would be a lot more inconvenient, if the person who buys power runs out, he would have to wait for the power provider to go online and manually turn it on for a certain amount of time, this could be a long wait before he could get more. With my idea, the power provider could take note of the power consumed, and compare it with the previous value to come up with a price, just like in real life, and there are countless of other uses for this block as well.

believe it or not but my idea is how power companies generally work. what happens if a county, city or state draws more power then the company can produce, then it drains their energy storage and everyone power gets shut off. however it is up to the power company to notify people when a general acceptable amount would be in some cases.

and if your job is something as important as the power provider for an SMP server, one would ussme that that player is responcible and would actually be online regardless like once every other day. and if someone is using over 100 million EUs per week then they either have issues or are running a MassFab, or like 10 overclockers in every machine they own. in which case it would be their fault/stupidity.

and you can detect how much EUs your Massfab is using by 2 ways.
1: the battery line i mentioned earlier to see roughly how long it takes to drain your line
2: you could simply use your EU detector and see that it's using 1024eu/t and then multiply that by how long it has been running or will be running.

also you could set it up so that once an MFSU is drained in the front then it would send a redstone signal out and would shut don't the splitter cable on the front of your MFSUs and would open the Splitter cable on the back end allowing it to refill, then you could very easily make a counter using Redstone Gates to detect how many times it has gone off and on. the EU detector multiplied by the amount of time is alot easier though.

Quote from Norisak

I'm pretty sure most people don't know how to create a redstone counter, and even if they do, it's hard to read how much power it has used in binary. It is also very inaccurate and limited. You can only see it in multiples of 40k/600k/10m and you are limited to using 32/128/512 EU/t, unless you make many, which then starts to be very costy, and even more inaccurate.

you can make it easier or harder depending on how much you know about redstone, if you really wanted you could do what my basic setup if and have a huge wall/line of MFSUs. for example, i have 15 in a column and they drain basically the exaclt same as a tank of water, i can go up and see how many are drained down to the bottom. if all 10 drain i could set it up so that a redstone torch is triggered with an AND Gate and have it turn 1 torch on, and then it refills and turns the gate back off, keeping that 1 torch set for the And Gate open, then when and if it triggers again, then that's another 150 million EUS used and it triggers the same wire and toggles the next AND Gate. you can set that setup with as many MFSUs as you see fit. if you don't a redstone counter or clock at all then keep stacking more and more MFSUs, if you don;t want to waste your diamonds then you can make research and learn to make a perfect Redstone Ticker Clock. there are even Tutorial videos as to have to make a perfect Redstone Digital Clock. you could integrate that is it only takes up like a 8 by 12 by 10 area i believe. the difficulty of it all depends on you. don't i'm completely hating on you cause i think it's a bad idea. it's a fairly good idea, however what your wanting to accomplish is already very much possible with relative ease. also say we did make this counter device, what if someone on your server up and decides (i want to max out the output of 6-12 MassFabs, they will be using 3072EU/t*(the ammount of MassFabs) and would drain like 37,000eu/t, at that case they would suck all your energy dry and screw over everyone else on your server cause then you would have 0 power. and if you had hundreds of MSFUs then that number would get way up in the billions if not more if you were on vacation for like 2-3 weeks. you'd come back and your EU counter would look like 515,263,457,865,345,6345,456... if it could even display all those numbers. i'd just set up enough MFSUs that each person thinks they can handle and once it runs dry they hand you (X amount of items for payment) and you refill their weekly allowance. if you leave for like 2 weeks and screw everyone over then just open up your reserve lines and give them a week of free power.