Currently, I have 13 Electrical engines with an enhanced circuit board with two tubes, increasing the output by 8MJ/t in each one, for a grand total of 130MJ/t being generated... I built Direwolf's mining well machine in an age that I created specifically for mining with it, and it draws around 400MJ/t, so I was looking for the best way to make lots of MJ energy. I looked at the different ways to make MJ energy and found the Bluelectric Engine is capable of generating 'up to' 32MJ/t and though sweet, looks like the best option... Until I read that it takes 1kW to make 1MJ. Solar panels are the best way to make Blutricity (all the other methods suck, frankly), but since they generate 120w each, I'd need 10 panels just to run one engine at full power. To generate enough power to continuuously run the machine, I'd need at least 13 Bluelectric Engines and at least 130 panels (plus Battery boxes) to generate enough power for the engines to run at full power. Are there any better (more efficient) ways to generate Bluetricity than the Solar Panels, or MJ than the Bluelectric Engines?
Best MJ generation method?
- Thread starter Cougar281
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Depends if you are going to constantly run the mining machine, if it's going to be idle until you need a burst of resources, then you won't need so much power constantly being generated, as you can store it in Energy Cells.
Advance beyond solar panels. There's many other ways of generating power.
You could make Biogas from plant matter, which will burn in a bio-gas engine for 5mj/t, or you could turn it into bio-fuel, and pump into a boiler.
If you have a tree farm, you can have a solid fuel boiler, and a liquid fuel boiler.
No doubt you will use an energy tesseract, so you'll also loose a % of your energy in the process.
Advance beyond solar panels. There's many other ways of generating power.
You could make Biogas from plant matter, which will burn in a bio-gas engine for 5mj/t, or you could turn it into bio-fuel, and pump into a boiler.
If you have a tree farm, you can have a solid fuel boiler, and a liquid fuel boiler.
No doubt you will use an energy tesseract, so you'll also loose a % of your energy in the process.
I've actually built it with five redstone energy cells, two Energy Tesseracts and one Item Tesseract (made a modification on DW's design and replaced the enderchests with Relays and tubeframes). It'll run for about 18 minutes at full speed down 180 levels to bedrock with zero power input from the main world. I've got plenty of EU (nine Ultimate Hybrid solar panels). BluTricity and MJ is where I'm not as 'rich' in power. Most of the time I probably would not need to run it for an extended time, but it would me nice to be able to... With the Blulectric engines, I also noticed that it seems each engine would need it's own 'farm'. I set up a Blulectric Engine and solar panel farm in my SP test world, and when I hooked them all up to a 100 panel & batterybox grid, the main feed was pulling 10kW, but that was split up between the 13 engines...
Well what does the best mean? Steam is the best if you have the setup for it... But the best and easiest to set up is by far Lava... And MagmaEngines... Lava piped in from the nether using Tesseracts... Or any other method you can think of of getting lava from nether. Just like steam you can use the same LavaSource To run Magma Engines or Thermal Generators For EU.
As much as I hate to suggest it, jump on the Boiler Bandwagon. A 36 HP Boiler or two, constantly fueled, can produce enough steam to fuel, what was it, 16 industrial steam engines per 36 HP boiler at fuel heat? That's a lot of MJ.
It's not cheap to set up, but it's profitable to have running. Kind of like many things in GT, really. Except Digital Chests, IMO. They cost way more then 8 barrels, so why would people consider using them(unless barrels were banned/didn't exist on a server)?
It's not cheap to set up, but it's profitable to have running. Kind of like many things in GT, really. Except Digital Chests, IMO. They cost way more then 8 barrels, so why would people consider using them(unless barrels were banned/didn't exist on a server)?
The Industrial Steam engine is only capable of outputting 8MJ/t. I'm already outputting 10MJ/t with the upgraded electrical engines.... or am I missing something? It's looking like the Electrical engines really are the best way to generate MJ. While the Blulectric engines can generate more MJ, they require a lot of Blutricity to do so, and that's difficult to generate in quantity. I have no shortage of EU, so maybe the answer is to build a bank of like 50 electrical engines. The nice thing about them is they require no maintenance and don't explode...
Bingo. It can use steam directly too.
There are tons of ways of MJ generation, if you don't like the boilers because of heatup, then go with fuel-rod like towers or combustion engines fed by a local oil refinery or biogas plant. It looks cooler too.
The thing is a boiler gives you enough steam to run several Industrial Steam Engines at full power.
I thought that OP was using the Direwolf20 pack. If not, well shit yeah, PowerConverters and it's energy bridge work wonders for MJ production if you have a decent amount of EU to burn. Or steam. In theory one could even use UE power, but I'm not convinced that it'll produce enough power consistently without using Mekinism or Complex Machines.
Yes, because PowerConverters are essentially broken. All hail PC, but the thing is that EU production and consumption doesn't scale linearly but MJ does. PowerConverters uses a fixed conversion rate that is good on the low end, but utterly breaks at scale. He'd have to do quite a bit of work to fix it, too. The only sensible way to do EU<->MJ conversion is to limit the maximum input and output of the devices to around where standard IC2 generators and medium-tier MJ engines work. Forestry does the very best job of this: it costs a LOT more EU to get more MJ.
So yeah. Essentially PowerConverters EU->MJ will always be better because it lets you scale in your output by IC2's tiered geometric standards rather than MJ's linear ones. It will never not be better.
I was using MindCrack, but switched to Ultimate because the only thing MC had that Ultimate didn't was Traincraft, which I'm not using, and I was interested in AE.
Kirin, not really sure what you're saying... on the one hand you're saying it's great at the low end, but it breaks at scale and costs a lot more EU to convert to MJ, and then you say it'll never not be better... which is it? It's certainly cleaner to set up than rows on rows of Electrical engines or the such...
I found that for some reason it was able to draw 512EU/t when it was connected up to my MV transformer (accidentally), and when I connected it directly to the solar panel grid, it pulls 1kV to generate 430MJ/t. It SEEMS to actually be pretty close to the conversion rate as using the electrical engines... based on what I was making (130MJ/t) and what I was using (somewhere around 384EU/t; I was hooked into three MFE's in parallel), I guestimate that to generate 430MJ/t using Electrical engines, I would use about 1.2kV EU. the conversion factor using hte PC is better, but not hugely... you could almost attribute the difference to the power converter being 'more efficient' than 43 upgraded electrical engines.
I was going to make three sets, but apparently one is capable of doing it all... It would seem it'll take as much as it needs at 512EU/t, and since I have like 4,000EU/t available...
Kirin, not really sure what you're saying... on the one hand you're saying it's great at the low end, but it breaks at scale and costs a lot more EU to convert to MJ, and then you say it'll never not be better... which is it? It's certainly cleaner to set up than rows on rows of Electrical engines or the such...
I found that for some reason it was able to draw 512EU/t when it was connected up to my MV transformer (accidentally), and when I connected it directly to the solar panel grid, it pulls 1kV to generate 430MJ/t. It SEEMS to actually be pretty close to the conversion rate as using the electrical engines... based on what I was making (130MJ/t) and what I was using (somewhere around 384EU/t; I was hooked into three MFE's in parallel), I guestimate that to generate 430MJ/t using Electrical engines, I would use about 1.2kV EU. the conversion factor using hte PC is better, but not hugely... you could almost attribute the difference to the power converter being 'more efficient' than 43 upgraded electrical engines.
I was going to make three sets, but apparently one is capable of doing it all... It would seem it'll take as much as it needs at 512EU/t, and since I have like 4,000EU/t available...
Well, considering that the OP has nine Ultimate Hybrid Solar Panels for his EU production, I really don't think it's unreasonable to use Power Converters to transfer the power.
Mind you, it's 100% efficient to use Power Converters. Plenty of "power converter" mods are 100% efficient between BC and IC2. I honestly think that Forestry was the first one I saw that didn't have the same, 100% efficient ratio. It threw off the idea that you should be able to freely swap the two energy systems.
And honestly? I like that. But calling Power Converters broken because it allows for a clean switch between EU and MJ seems stupid to me because (as far as I remember and know) Forestry is the only "power converter" which doesn't have a clean switch.
EDIT: Also I hate the idea of fixating on Efficiency. I'm planning on using UE to power most of my stuff when I finally get a house built in a nice location, and PC is my goto system for converting power, because that's what it's meant to do.
That's more a problem of there just not being any high MJ producers or storage while there are high MJ consumers (extra bee machines for example). Even if the ratio of EU to MJ were 5:1 instead of 2.5:1, I'd still produce EU and power converters to MJ simply because a high energy EU producer is a lot more lag efficient than large arrays of engines.
That should be the equivalent of three or four maxed out liquid boilers. Instead it's the equivalent of dozens.
Efficiency is not the problem.
Okay but it is not working "correctly" in that it takes a relative proportion of EU and turns it into a reasonable sum of MJ. And doing that correctly is actually really, really hard.
So long as you avoid EU it's great. EU breaks everything.[DOUBLEPOST=1368812066][/DOUBLEPOST]
This is not the problem. Efficiency has nothing to do with it.