Okay I changed the set up. I made a set of 6 redstone energy cells spaced apart so all but one side has an electrical engine attached all powered by ult solars and hooked to my bee machines using redstone conducts. But the machines still tank, and struggle flickering between 0/1 MJ and still takes ages to do anything. I don't notice any boosted speed from the other set up.
Let's see. 6 cells with 5 engines each at 2 MJ/t -> 6*5*2 = 60 MJ/t. You are still producing only barely more than half of what that ONE machine can consume, much less all of those you showed in the first screenshot. You probably have somewhere between 200 and 300 MJ/t to supply if you want all of them to run at the same time.
Now, on to troubleshooting. If none of the machines have any work scheduled, then their internal buffers should start filling up. Even with "only" 60 MJ/t this should be fairly quick and noticable, so long as none of the machines is actively doing something. If you don't see the internal buffer fill up at all, you have a problem in your power delivery.
1.) Are all the redstone energy cells empty? In other words, are they all outputting? Nearby redstone signal sources can potentially deactivate redstone energy cells unless they are configured to ignore that behavior in their GUI.
2.) Are all conduits wrenched correctly? The attachment point of the conduit to the redstone energy cell must be showing orange (with a stylized arrow pointing outward), while the attachment points of the consuming machines must be showing blue (with a stylized arrow pointing towards the machine). Change this by right-clicking the respective conduit section with a Buildcraft compatible wrench. A common mistake stems from the fact that a single block cannot have both inputting and outputting behavior, meaning you need to have at least two pieces of conduit between the energy cell and any machine. One piece to be set to outputting from the cell, and a second piece to be set to inputting into the machine.
3.) Are all of the energy cells still set to their default transfer amounts of 100 MJ/t in, 50 MJ/t out? It should work without problems in that configuration, but if you changed something it might cause an unintended side effect (especially the input value, as you're still using directly attached engines).
Further improvement suggestions:
- Stop attaching engines directly.
You removed them from the machines, but now they are sitting on the redstone energy cells, which also have a burst input limit of 100 MJ (provided you didn't lower it even further in the GUI). For one un-upgraded electric engine this number is just barely OK, but more powerful engines (or groups of basic engines all stroking in unison) will fail to transfer their full output. As I said before: always use conduits or conductive pipes. Don't attach engines directly. A conduit for example has a burst input limit of 1,000 MJ, which no engine currently in the game can possibly reach (in fact, even groups rarely pass 500). A conduit will never limit your engines in any way.
- Upgrade your electric engines. Use a soldering iron to solder electron tubes made in a thermionic fabricator onto a circuit board, and then place that circuit board into the electric engine. While the base production rate of an electric engine is 2 MJ/t for 6 EU/t, if you go all out (two tin and two bronze tubes on an intricate circuit board) you can bump it up to 14 MJ/t for 50 EU/t. A single ultimate solar could still drive 10 of these engines, for a total of 140 MJ/t, more than twice of what you currently produce with 30 (but you definitely need to attach the upgraded engines to conduits, and remember to wrench them correctly).
