Central vs Individual Power

i prefer one factory until i am endgame, then i have fun and will build multiple small complex systems all over the place.

I always do individual small plants. My initial home base was powered by 8 geothermal plants, and I had a huge basement filled with Buildcraft lava tanks to store all the lava I needed. Now that I'm building multiple factory facilities, I'm giving them each their own solar arrays, which can power them fairly well for many Minecraft days.

In the future, I plan to make a fun little emergency backup system in a central location under my city and hook it up to all the buildings. That way they can run on their own until their stores from solar run out, then draw from the backup grid. Heck, I might even make it so that the overflow from the solars can flow back into the backup MFSU systems to recharge them so that the only time I need to run a reactor would be during extended emergencies when solar and stored extra both fail.

In multiplayer:

I play in a faction server, so all my small bases and forges run by geothermals and lava cells. And I use marks I for helping my mass fabs

And I prefer this style cuz in a constat war, I need a reliable, mobile, cheap and easy to hide power source.

By the way, I love when n00bs make solar flowers and windmill towers. So much fun blowing up their bases :3

In single player:

When I start, I have my main bases workshop in the overworld running with geothermals with lava cells from the nether. In mid game I replace the geothermals for MFSU with lapotron crystals from my geothermal station in the nether.
In endgame I move my main base to the nether, where I made a complex of tunels and portals, connecting my outposts/mines in the overworld. The nether base use a massive geothermal station. The outposts and mining sites uses or geothermals with lava cells from the nether, or a MFE/MFSU with energy/lapp crystals for the most permanent/energy hungry sites. The outposts that use MFE/MFSU have their own geothermal station in the nether. And my mass fabs runs buy individuals geothermal station.

All this with a centralize power design cuz I made walls with all the machinery needed, and I usually don't bother making autofabs.

And, from time to time, I use some CASUC reactors in cutes coolant pools, smalls solar flower and a very few windmills(too much engineer required to be usefull). And ofcourse, I use all of this purely as decoration.

And I prefer this style cuz is simple, cheap and productive.

But recently I start playing with Thaumcraft, and I don't know if its going to make an impact in my IC gameplay (and if i cant research something usefull quickly, im gonna give the kick to thaumcraft).

might be a little late, but i prefer a strong power plant for my main base and multiple small ones for everything outside.
my main focus lies on hiding everything and do nothing, so all my power plants have to be hidable and preferably self-sustaining. for that i'm using power converter's which gives some nice energy generation options. one of those options is the water cell, a redstone engine powered pump connected to four improved watermills, producing 8EU/t and easily hidable, perfect for small projects like forestry plantages.
my second design would be the oil fab generator, which uses the surplus of energy gained by refining oil to fuel and burning it in a combustion engine while using this energy to generate more oil and EU. it produces something around 300EU/t, is relativly small for this output and it leaves a nice hole in the ground should the cooling for the combustion engines ever fail. you can't take a generator serious that can't explode
if i use that, a giant water cell plant or a simple geothermal/nuclear plant depends on my mood, but it has to be hidden underground.

For me, the proverbial holy trinity of design are simplicity, transparency, and redundancy. That last one is relevant, here.

What I mean by this is, let's say you've got a single, centralised power station, and it gets visited by 2-3 creepers. All of your machines have then lost power. If you're running multiple generators, however, and one of them gets hit, then depending on what kind one of the others is, you can divert power from it to your other local machines, either from your storage, or from the generator itself.

At the same time, you don't generally want to put a single generator on a single machine, because you'll probably run into inefficiency issues there as well. So my own strategy, in most cases, would be to devote probably four machines to a single generator/storage pair, depending on what type of generator you use. Given that I generally only use geothermal so far, I can do that. Wind or solar would probably need a bit more figuring out in order to do; I haven't seen anyone on YouTube only using a single wind generator. People usually seem to build farms of them. I've experimented with water a bit, but only small scale, and not much. Water again seems pretty horrible unless you either put a lot of them in, or use a looping Redpower2 setup with a deployer and buckets, which I wouldn't mind doing myself, but which a lot of people around here would probably consider cheating, given the opinions I've seen on using other mods with IC in this forum.

So, yeah. The design of the natural generators (except maybe solar) seems to be biased in favour of centralisation, in the sense that you usually have to put in a multi-node farm of them to get any really decent amount of power. As I've said, geothermal power is the only form I've used so far, because from what I've seen, the resource cost to output ratio of just about anything else, comparitively speaking, really doesn't seem worth my time.

I prefer the simplicity of having one power source for everything. Mobile platforms such as my quarry normally run off their own individual sources (solar -> electric engine(s) -> quarry) as its a pain to run long wires everywhere. I've never had issues with redundancy, it just doesn't happen. A watchful eye seems to me atleast to be perfectly capable of keeping creepers clear of my energy production areas. I normally build a nice big wall anyway.

I generaly have 3 power plants:
1st my factory/workshop/crafting thing which is run off solars from adv solars
and once i get my peat farm going, a generator for backup
2nd is my overworld massfab system, which consists if a overclocked recycler and massfab. I power this part with my reactor and any spare solars i might have.
3rd is my nether massfab plant which has a buildcraft pump being power my forestry electric engines feeding a ton of geothermals. The geos power the electric engines for the pump, and my farms which are also in the nether and of course, the mass fab

Centralized power for me. Early game I usually throw up an RP2 manned watermill system as soon as I get the enderpearls for the retriever. Ya, I know it's somewhat exploiting the system, but it gets me where I need to go. Mid game I tend to use a lot of forestry stuff, mostly bio fuel generators. Usually mixed in with with LV and maybe MV solar arrays. Late game, it depends on how chEEting I'm feeling. If I'm going all out, its all about an energy condenser send lava cells into geothermal generators. If I'm not using EE, HV solar pannels at my temporary locations, and multiple nuclear reactors at my main base. I know nukes are less efficient (and more dangerous) than solar, but I like the idea.

As for the original question, I like the idea of centralized power. I tend not to get rid of old power sources once I upgrade, so I tend to keep them as backups. Also, really late game. I have multiple MFSU connected in serial to serve as battery backup. Lately, I've been working on an automatic generator backup. When the first MFSU in serial sends a redstone signal on power empty, it trips an RS NOR latch that opens a valve pipe, allowing bio fuel to flow into a serious of forestry generators. That system remains active until it is either manually shut down, or if the last MFSU sends a signal on full that trips the RS NOR latch. I guess this could also be done with RP 2, standard generators with fuel cans, and a retriever. Late game, I also make sure to have enough solar backup to keep all my advanced machines running at standby.

For the frame quarry and anything mobile, I use a lapotron crystal + enderchest system. No need to build lots of solar pannels.

As for redundancy, I always make sure to have some kind of backup, usually by leaving or mothballing my old power production. I've been working on a RP2 Control system that detects if the backups have been engaged, and uses splitter cables to shut down any non-vital machines, but my lack of FORTH ability has been making things difficult.

I use small power stations for each "base" I make, since I tend to have Mystcraft ages for specific things(a eternal day bright skyland was my choice for agriculture, but I ended up spitting the farms between my main base and the skyfarm). I usually just throw down a few solars when I can afford it and walk away, since I prefer easy and renewable energy(hint: I suck at redstone stuff and automation), but if that's not enough, I have a Thaumcraft2 Vis Generator to power big things(which I have at my main base). Just a basic obsidian generator fueling a Thaumic Generator. The vis is split between it and a duplicator making redstone.
I plan on adding a mob farm to bring in passive vis, but alas, not my zone of expertise. I should try, though. I mean, I have enough time and space to make one. Might as well, right?

RP2 based auto charging and discharging with lapotron crystals isn't too hard to set up, and with enderchest works great for providing power to mystcraft ages and ender/nether bases. Works just as well with standard crystals, RE batteries, and RP2 batteries. I'm actually using a version to power my horizontal RP2 quarry in one of my SSP worlds. All you need is a charging side with a filter pulling depleted !powerstorage out of a chest, with the tubes going into the top of your charging system. Then, a retriever that pulls only fully charged medium out if the machines, with the retriever output going back into the chest.

Then you reverse everything on the discharge side. The filter pulls fully charged medium out of the chest, with the pipes going into the bottom of your energy storage or machines. The retriever pulls depleted medium out and puts it back into the chest to be recharged. Works really well on SMP where the different worlds stay loaded. There is an upper limit on energy transfer per enderchest "channel" but I really have never run into it.

Quote from Keserian

RP2 based auto charging and discharging with lapotron crystals isn't too hard to set up, and with enderchest works great for providing power to mystcraft ages and ender/nether bases. Works just as well with standard crystals, RE batteries, and RP2 batteries. I'm actually using a version to power my horizontal RP2 quarry in one of my SSP worlds. All you need is a charging side with a filter pulling depleted !powerstorage out of a chest, with the tubes going into the top of your charging system. Then, a retriever that pulls only fully charged medium out if the machines, with the retriever output going back into the chest.

Then you reverse everything on the discharge side. The filter pulls fully charged medium out of the chest, with the pipes going into the bottom of your energy storage or machines. The retriever pulls depleted medium out and puts it back into the chest to be recharged. Works really well on SMP where the different worlds stay loaded. There is an upper limit on energy transfer per enderchest "channel" but I really have never run into it.

Which is all fine and dandy for SMP since you can have different dimensions loaded at once(more so with the new chunkloader from Chicken_Bones, which can load Mystcraft ages as well, allowing one to have my old Skyfarm loaded while I'm on a mining world), but I usually play SSP since Thaumcraft2 is SSP.
That set up would allow for one to transfer energy between ages just fine, but without the ability to keep separate dimensions loaded as well, one can only transfer so much energy per trip, which means for me, a power station for each age is best, with a large power supply in the overworld, both with lots of Vis and Energy from different mods ready for transportation(only BC energy is impossible to transfer this way, but there are plenty of mods to allow one to turn MJ into EU and back, so that's not a issue for me).

Interesting question to say the least:

Starting out, you really do have to centralize your power, due to limited resources. But, once machinery and technology becomes more fluidly available, you can 'afford' to spread out...

As for me, I prefer a centralized location for the sake of security and cost-effectiveness of resources. Yet, on some items, I can spread my power around via teleport pipes and converters when necessary...

(that's also the reason why I'm still keeping Buildcraft, btw... )

I have three fixed grids and one mobile grid.

My layout is a bit unusual, as most of the machines are in one place, but the power plants are all over.

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