Some time ago i used plugins for bukkit to get our few km long transmission line working, which worked well.
I just had to increase the java VM stack as the defalut value was causing a stack overflow from the recursion of method
calcCurrent or similar. i set there 32MB and it was ok. However, the server has thrown an unknown exception few times
without any trace(!) but i had no idea what caused it, whether that were bukkit plugins or the IC itself..
It would all work fine if the IC was made as a seperate part of the game, calculating events privately not using the chunk updates
except for changes you make to the wiring. Just an idea, i don't know much about the MC structure so i can't tell how difficult
it would be, but if i could get my hands on the IC source code, i could try implementing my idea..