I'm trying to use combustion engines to power a quarry, and I've noticed a problem with my MJ/t. I've read online that combustion engines should output 6MJ/t (although I've never been totally clear if this is on green, yellow, or red). However, if I connect a combustion engine to a redstone energy cell I can control the rate that energy leaves the energy cell. Theoretically, if the combustion engine produced 6 MJ/t, and I set the redstone energy cell to output a maximum of 5 MJ/t (with a load connected to the energy cell, like a quarry), then the redstone energy cell should built up a surplus of energy. However, when I try this (with a combustion engine running on green), I find that the redstone energy cell never fills.
Moreover, I found that when I connect two engines to the redstone energy cell the energy cell will accumulate energy when I set the output to 2MJ/t, but it will drain when I set the output to 3 MJ/t, suggesting that each engine is outputting between 1 and 1.5 MJ/t (again the engines are running on green). I've tried using conductive pipe as well as redstone conduit with the same results.
So the question is: what's wrong with my reasoning? Do combustion engines really output such low power on green? Or, do I not understand redstone energy cells? Perhaps its a difference of ticks versus seconds?
I should note that I'm not using the most recent version of tekkit. I'm currently using 1.1.5 because I found that everything beyond this version breaks the conductive pipe gates.