With the level of industry you're talking about, its possible a single Auroral couldn't cut it.
For my own: a single extractor run properly can keep up with an awful lot of mining, particularly if you extract stuff as you need it and store the rest as ore until you do (which is more efficient anyway.) For instance if I already have 100k iron, I just stop extracting iron for a while. And as you know they're way more energy efficient if you set them up properly.
Also: borers don't really consume much energy. With efficiency upgrades, they're ridiculously cheap. They won't consume much of your power at all.
And really, there just wasn't many things that were "always" running, other than a few disconnected farming things running off their own perpetual motion machines (DC engines, etc). The borers and some nuclear infrastructure are running 100% of the time, the extractors running 80% of the time, and the rest are mostly on-and-off as required for the most part.
I've been using high power for the extractor mainly because I didn't want to use a timer and a toggle switch of some sort, it slows things down more than my liking. Is there a way to remove the middle stage products from the extractor, to switch between two different extractors or something? Every time I try I only get the flakes out, but if I can use two extractors for different stages, then I only need 16MW x 2 extractors to run top speed. Otherwise I'm either stuck with a toggle, or huge power usage.
I thought the borer took quite a bit of power. For torque the book says that it's 512Nm for harder materials, but even when I had one on 4096Nm it kept getting stuck (rather randomly). Looking for an answer I stumbled on a wiki page that said the torque was per block, not per slice, and that seemed to make sense with the bore getting stuck randomly whilst having what would've seemed like loads of torque. I haven't gotten to test much further than that yet, since the next test was going to be supplying TONS of torque to see if it still gets stuck. Could you offer any insights?
It still seems a bit odd to me that the top tier battery can't output energy at anywhere near the level that you're producing it, at the stage you'd make one. With a 20GW reactor setup, you'd need 80 batteries, (41k diamonds) to keep up with it if you actually wanted to use it all. The way batteries inputs/storage/outputs are setup it seems that when using batteries and reactors, you'd charge up the batteries every once in a while, then you'd be set for power for days/weeks at a time between reactor runs.