best energy source?

[Greg Savage]

I am curious what the best/easiest form of sustainable energy is? I have tried solar panels but that takes forever to build anything good enough to power my base.

[Lethosos]

Lava. You have at least two options to use it, perhaps more with other mods. The best source is the Nether, although it's easier to drain various pockets underground.

[Mooseman9]

You could make a tree farm that takes the wood and autocrafts to scaffolding, and powering generators and steam engines with that. 3x more efficient than coal too, and the best part is that it's renewable and easy to setup.

[zorn]

Solar power or nuclear reactor it seems. It seems solar panels were upgraded to reduce lag. Do you want 500 water mills filling a basement and requiring lots of cpu calculations or one high voltage solar panel taking up one block of space on your roof? It seems no one created upgraded water or wind power, so solar it is.

it all depends on what you want to power. A few medium or high voltage solar panels will easily run one quarry and process all the ore. A mass fabricator seems to be the only thing that requires a ton of energy, but i cant find any recipes for anything that is not plentiful and easy to get in big dig (due to quarry and high ore content) other than glowstone. So you can make a mass fabricator to make glowstone, then just mine up whatever else you need, why use UU matter to make gold, when you can just mine it up easily? maybe im missing something?

what exactly is it that you want to do?

[Greg Savage]

You could make a tree farm that takes the wood and autocrafts to scaffolding, and powering generators and steam engines with that. 3x more efficient than coal too, and the best part is that it's renewable and easy to setup.

At first, I wasn't getting the scaffold idea until i realized 2 logs could make 16 scaffold @ 750 eu each compared to the same 2 logs making only 2k eu as charcoal. That is such a good idea Mooseman.

Solar power or nuclear reactor it seems. It seems solar panels were upgraded to reduce lag. Do you want 500 water mills filling a basement and requiring lots of cpu calculations or one high voltage solar panel taking up one block of space on your roof? It seems no one created upgraded water or wind power, so solar it is.

it all depends on what you want to power. A few medium or high voltage solar panels will easily run one quarry and process all the ore. A mass fabricator seems to be the only thing that requires a ton of energy, but i cant find any recipes for anything that is not plentiful and easy to get in big dig (due to quarry and high ore content) other than glowstone. So you can make a mass fabricator to make glowstone, then just mine up whatever else you need, why use UU matter to make gold, when you can just mine it up easily? maybe im missing something?

what exactly is it that you want to do?

I am trying to mess around with the Applied Energistics along with all the other stuff and just wondered what other people are doing to power all this stuff since solar panels are just a pain to mass produce sometimes.

[captainsmiley77]

I find having a automatic blaze farm transporting blaze rods automaticly to your engines by far the best energy source.

[DiscordianAgent]

You can one-up that smiley by having a macerator grind the blaze rods, piping the the dust to an auto-crafting table (reg or mk2) which uses a minim stone to combine them back into blaze rods, and then goes through a diamond pipe on the way back to the macerator again, with the diamond pipe set to send most to the macer but having a few go out to the generators. Toss in some hoppers to control the overflow, and after a while you'll have tons of blaze rods. Macerator makes 5 dust from 1 rod, minim stone makes 1 rod from 2 dust, so you are making 2.5x blaze rods per run. Only resource being consumed is the minim stone, so you'd have to go kill mobs from time to time, but this can be strong.

Easiest option is lava from the nether going into geothermal or magmatic engines.

If you have some quarrys going and the Applied Energetics crafting system, it's not too hard to just teach it how to make an HV solar, although, they still cost a ton.

A very under-appreciated power source is wind power for EU, if you make a cable (could be a tin cable even!) going from H100 to H140 and put 40 wingens on each face of the cable, for a total of 160 (you can put 1 on top and 4 around the mfsu or whatever at bottom also), it will output over 512 EU on average _all the time_, it's _stronger_ when solar isn't working during rain, and is only slightly over half the number of units required to make an HV solar (160 windgen vs 512 panels). The windgen requires no copper, glass, or coal dust, so it's total construction costs are very reasonable when you consider the energy of cooking / macerating those things as well. But you do have this giant power cable sticking up off your base, and it's kinda noisy if you stand next to it. But if you live on a volcano or in extreme hills anyway it's very affordable continuous HV power.

[Nickpauwels1988]

nuclear energy has gotten a boost in this modpack

[Coex]

Hello This thread have died some months ago I can see, yet I'm still new to this mod and need some advice. I was thinking about the tree farm as Mooseman9 said, then I found out it wasn't possible to make the scaffold anymore, except in vine version. Then I thought about the one with netherracks in a magma crucible, and then wasn't able to find the geothermal. Is there something I'm completely lost in or have these items just disappeared? If any is still playing this mod, could you please me which is the best and most effecient power supply and how to set it up?

[legomainiac]

I'm currently using lava as a power source. You need to go to the nether place a pump, a ender tank on top and 4 redstone engines, with an anchor nearby so the chuck stays loaded. In the overworld have another ender tank connected to the one in the nether, have it pump into magmatic enignes. I have those engines connected to redstone energy conduits for the no energy loss and those connected to a redstone energy cell (battery) and a energy tesseract so I can have energy anywhere. I'm looking into making a tree multi farm for chestnuts so I can squeeze them into seed oil and pump it into engines. It's renewable but kind of hard to get to since you need to do tree breeding to get the chestnut tree.

[Belone]

Yeah I've always used lava being pumped from the Nether. I always feel dirty for doing as it's so easy, but meh! Also the reason you can't find the scaffold and geothermal reactors is because they were in IndustrialCraft2 which was removed from BigDig shortly after this topic.

[Raziel420]

A guy is working on a mod called big reactors (big-reactors.net) he is aiming for it to be included in big dig and is designed to compiment big dig nicely. It uses it's own power ore (yellorium) and a couple custom machines, plus the core which is a multiblock for the reactor itself. Currently it's WAY overpowered and has unlimited fuel (it uses yellorium which comes out as a waste item and can be converted into blutonium with the exact same power output as yellorium). It can also generate rediculous amounts of power. Heat isn't coded in yet properly so theres no penalty for making a massive (up to 32x32 by default) reactor including no cooling and generating 100000MJ/t. Plans for later version remove the direct power generation of it (he's wanting to do cooling loops with steam turbines generating power while cooling the system more like an actual nuclear reactor) and include redpower interfaces.

[IIAIIStarzII]

Personally, I would suggest using Hydrogen Generators. The fact they're cheap, they work forever, and give a reasonable amount of energy. You don't have to put anything in them. I'll give a tutorial on how to make an efficient and compact setup (VERY COMPACT)

First of, you will need an electric pump, electrolytic separator and Hydrogen Generator. (These are all must-have machines)

Now, make an infinite water source (3x1 recommended)

Place the Electric pump on top of the middle water source.

Now place 1 mechanical pipe on the side which will have no water under the pipe.

Now, stand on your electric pump and place an electrolytic separator on the mechanical pipe. Now, stand on whatever side you want your power to go and place the Hydrogen generator on top of the electric pump.

Now use some Universal cable to connect the electric pump and electrolytic seperator to the hydrogen generator (because they use power to work).

Finally, open the electrolytic separator GUI and on the bottom left corner you will see "Dump" and set that to "o" and toss 1 piece of redstone in the electrolytic seperator and electric pump and your infinite power is done!

P.S. This may seem complicated because SO MANY steps but trust me, it's simple.

[DJ_NaWt_NiCe]

i tried your idea all star i think im setting it up wrong