Best renewable energy source?

[Truculent]

I play on Tekkit, EE is turned off. 95% of my power use is IC2, the BC stuff is run off electrical engines or energy link. Currently I have a mixed geothermal+nuclear setup which is great, but these aren't infinitely renewable. I can keep mining for more uranium and lava, but it means carving ever-bigger holes in the ground.

Solar is the obvious option, obviously. But the default solar is a huge CPU hog, and I don't like compact solar because it's just a dumb little box that spits out free power. I want big machines with pipes and wires and stuff being piped all over!

I know about the Oil Fabricator -> Refinery -> Engine Generator loop, seems like an exploit.

Right now I'm contemplating a few options.

1) Forestry peat farm, feeding generators.

2) Forestry tree farm, feeding charcoal to generators and saplings to fermenters to biofuel generators.

3) An even more awesome RedPower tree farm using deployers, block breakers and stuff.

4) ??? something I didn't think of yet?

If anyone has any other ideas or feedback, I'd appreciate it. Particularly I'd like to know around how much EU/t one can net out of the Forestry tree or peat farms.

[Rabbit]

I know you're not going to like this suggestion at first, but I would at least take it into consideration. Turn EE back on, and use it only so far as to construct a Volcanite Amulet. The amulet can be used to generate lava at the cost of redstone. If you want a big cool automated setup, throw the amulet into a deployer, pump in stacks of redstone using pneumatic tubes and attach the whole assembly to a timing circuit. Then construct a pumping system above your self-maintaing lava pool and feed it to your hydrothermal generators.

Now, redstone isn't exactly renewable on its own so I would suggest using EE to keep your stocks of it filled. This sounds unbalanced until you realized that redstone is used quickly in this setup and with the newest version of EE, redstone is expensive. At least expensive enough that you'll be throwing hundreds of stacks of dirt & cobble, or dozens of ores and ingots into your EE furnaces just to keep enough redstone on hand to keep the thermal generators churning.

[Truculent]

It's a good idea, though I think probably there are better ways to get IC2 power out of EE. But infinite exponential power aside, EE is off on the server mostly for thematic reasons -- we don't feel it fits in with the "technical" side of things, but this is just an opinion, to each their own of course. Thanks though -- it's a good idea and useful to those playing with EE.

[Eldmor]

Use tons of Strainers hooked up do a Pump that is drawing from an infinite water source.

[Neowulf]

4 pumps, 16 redstone engines, 16 strainers, some tin cable, some gold waterproof pipe, and an infinite water source = perfectly reliable 32EU/t

You can fit it in a 7x7x7 space too.

[Captain Man]

With EE off, renewable resources actually means something! A diamond every 14 seconds is so close to the effects of actual cheating that I see no practical difference. I admire your resolve!

The only renewable resources I know of in minecraft are anything plant related. So yeah, forestry is definately your best bet. I haven't delved into its biogas and stuff but I'm guessing a setup to take logs, dump them into a furnace (or save up until you have a serious crap ton and use an induction furnace, I believe that would be more efficient) and SHAZAM! Now you've got charcoal out the wazoo.

Dump them into some generators (multiple so you get more EU/t) and hook em up to a MFESUEU or whatever the tier 3 storage unit is called (MFSU I think) and bam! I think that should be good.

Also, I don't know anything about matter generation with the mass fab but I'd hope you could somehow manage to use it to get a net profit with uranium so it's also effectively renewable (Nuclear Generator -> Matter -> Uranium -> Nuclear Generator).

[Eldmor]

Sadly, you cannot make Uranium with UU-Matter.

In an earlier version, iirc, you could with a large U shape, but the creator realized this could mean infinite, high-output energy and nipped it.

[7rex]

I use redpower deployer, filter and retreiver with an infinite water source to feed buckets of water to my water mills or lately i'm using a the peat farm with peat engines.

The peat farm option is very cheap to simple to setup.

[OmegaJasam]

Theres always the watermil + redpower setup which creates 2eu/tick energy. (aka, cheaper more powerful solar)

Slightly less renewable (but long lived) is pumping lava from the nether into an ender chest and extracting it from it for geothermal in the regular world.

Else a crazy forestry setup is probably your best bet if you want something that feels 'legit'

[Captain Man]

I don't know about that, because doesn't the nether not stay active while in the overworld? Perhaps a chunk loading block could fix that?

[7rex]

Chunk loading blocks won't work in the nether as it gets completely unloaded when you leave.

[Captain Man]

Alright, I guess you could pump lots of lava, geotherm it, then store it in some crystals and harvest nether stuff while you wait? (No EE means lots of harvesting of nether stuff. Man... EE is so useful when you think about it...)

[killerx09]

Try using biomass, then refining it to biofuel. Pretty efficient if you have a tree farm producing saplings.

[MechaCrash]

Don't refine it into biofuel, just put it directly into biogas engines hooked up to engine generators. This gets you a lot more power than you'd get from Forestry's biopower generator, and while I'm not sure of the burn time of biomass in a biogas engine compared to biofuel in a combustion engine, I'm sure saving the extra refining step makes up for it.

[killerx09]

According to the forestry wiki, Biofuel burns at about the rate of normal fuel.

Also, for a comparison between oil and fuel: One bucket of oil refines one bucket of fuel, but one bucket of fuel refines twenty buckets of fuel. So I suggest you go refine it.

[milcondoin]

75000MJ/Bucket biomass in biogas engine -> engine generator -> 187500 EU

200000MJ/Bucket biofuel in combustion engine -> engine generator -> 500000 EU

2 buckets biomass give one bucket biofuel for a cost of 750 MJ IIRC.

150750 MJ < 200000 MJ => refine your biomass if you can manage not having your combustion engine explode due to unloaded chunks at the cooling-pool. Use the biogas engine with biomass, to avoid all that cooling stuff (if you let your engine run for a long time, else it would cool of inbetween your usages and require new lava to heat up way too often). Output of both is 5 MJ/t.

[killerx09]

Meet chunckloaders, costing only 4 iron. Iron gates can be used to prevent engines blowing up, so mweh.

[milcondoin]

Iron gates? Is that stuff from Buildcraft 3, thus Technic only, not Tekkit?

[DemonCrusher36]

I challenge you to make 100 golem batteries, connected to vis crucibles and the thaumic vis to other source thingy and see how good it is.

As in:

SNOWMEN-----> VIS CRUCIBLE---> THAUMIC GENERATER THAT MAKES IC/BC POWER--->STORAGE

You can use timers for 0.200 seconds and block breakers.

[Jay?]

Meet chunckloaders, costing only 4 iron. Iron gates can be used to prevent engines blowing up, so mweh.

Or you could be super pro, and use Reis minimap to check your chunk lines, and keep all your cooling stations in the same chunks as the things that are being cooled.

[MechaCrash]

I had no idea that the combustion engine generated so much more power with the biogas engine. I guess I'll stick with that in the future, then.

Also, chunk loaders changed. It's not four iron in a shapeless recipe now, it's eight iron around a piece of lapis, but this gets you four chunk loaders instead of just one.

[mechanicalFactory]

Expanding on Demoncrusher's idea of thaumcraft generators, if you're willing to use EE and willing to not listen to the constant TICTICTICTIC of a .2 sec timer going.

What you do is (eventually) get an energy condenser and the relay/collectors to support it, then put a slime ball in the energy condenser's target slot, and pipe that stuff to your crucible.

Slimeballs are very efficient in the EE -> Thaums ratio, plus a crucible of slime seems right for a wizard/alchemist/engineer/whatever.

Then you get a bank of thaum generators, and put 1 node near the middle of the generators. The way it works is that you don't have to waste time/resources placing the conduits, since the thaums will fly right to the generators.

Basically like this;

------------------------- - = your favorite high voltage cable

\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ \ = generators

* * = node

C C = crucible, preferably the thaumic one so you don't have to baby sit it.

[The Merchant of Menace]

I challenge you to make 100 golem batteries, connected to vis crucibles and the thaumic vis to other source thingy and see how good it is.

As in:

SNOWMEN-----> VIS CRUCIBLE---> THAUMIC GENERATER THAT MAKES IC/BC POWER--->STORAGE

You can use timers for 0.200 seconds and block breakers.

2 snowman batteries on 0.200 seconds produces snowballs faster than a crucible can smelt them. 100 snowmen would cause terminal lag in about 30 seconds of running.

[Truculent]

Thanks for all the tips guys, biofuel seems the way to go.

P.S. there's no Thaumcraft in Tekkit.

[miniboxer]

solar energy to fabricate everything. I go on a server where one of the admins who has never spawned an item once, never has to mine, not even with quarries. how? He has a billion solar panels that power mass fabricators