Kirin, I've never looked at boilers and such, but the Ultimate Hybrid Solar Panels are SUPER EXPENSIVE to build... took me quite a while and a lot of resources to build the nine that I have. I'm GUESSING, that they are a LOT more expensive to make than the boilers and steam engines, so I'm not sure about your 'they should be equal to three or four maxed out boilers' comment.
It depends on how you cost them, but your adv solars are dirt cheap given that they're effectively free, infinite, unmaintained power forever that is just a block you plop down. It represents the very worst aspects of IC2 power system design exemplified in a single block so as to not murder the server. If a field of solars were not so hard on servers, they'd be better a better outcome. That's how bad.
But in terms of the power, I'm not sure you understand quite how much MJ you can put out. If you have four advanced solars that's 2048 eu/t production; quite a bit! But a matter fab can easily eat that much and more, as can a few other GT-based machines. But lots of GT machines take 128eu/t, so you can't build forever this way. But using Power Crystals's math, your eu/t can be converted optimally into
843 mj/t. Most high pressure boiler setups run around 64-80 mj/t (they can do better, I suppose? The ceiling is like 120 some odd, right?) and have big efficiency curves, while your system starts and stops on a dime, so your system is worth about
a dozen boilers and engines which each take stacks and stacks of steel to make, and require constant fuel input. Even one 512eu/t power source is worth over two max boilers with engine sets.
Consider for a second how much MJ that is. Only a tiny handfull of machines consume that much power, most notably from extrabees. Even quarries barely eat more than a single boiler's worth. Very few people's operations need more than 6 boilers ever; it's just so much MJ and TE makes MJ so easy to store that it's hardly worth doing.
I am pretty sure at some point you cannot use iridium and UU matter as an argument against this. It's broken because of the way EU scales, not the cost of any block or the specific conversion factor. Until converter mods take scale into account, they will forever mean replicated EU solutions wil outperform everything else.[DOUBLEPOST=1368813285][/DOUBLEPOST]
is it even possible to create a power conversion mod, that wont be "broken"?
Yes, but it's hard work. And if you're going to really do it right it's computationally expensive.