Right now I'm using a nice mid-game power generating configuration. Only issue is that it uses a lot of metal to get started:
use rails to hook everything up onto a distribution network with railcraft loaders and unloaders.
-First I have a solar powered steve's cart farming wheat for me (it makes seeds too that I plan to turn into biofuel, but that's for a later, more efficient setup)
-I supply stone bricks, which I eventually just want to hook an extruder + factorization furnace heater + iron furnace + autocrafting table to in order to make infinite.
-stone bricks + wheat go into 2 moisteners which make mulch and mossy stone as a by product.
-mulch goes in carpenter with extruder+pulverizer to make sand. original dirt is supplied here
-carpenter spits out bog earth which gets piped to 3 peat bogs powered by peat fired engines. these spit out peat and dirt. cycle dirt back into the carpenter for infinite dirt.
-peat goes into a chest. when the chest is 100% full you have enough peat to cold start a 3x3 solid fueled boiler with 36 high pressure tanks. Cool the boiler with shit tons of accumulated water.
-boiler now produces infinite 760 steam per tick. route some of that steam into hobbyist engines to supply power to the carpenter and to the pulverizer making sand. this should take 3 hobbyist engines drawing 30 steam. This also produces gravel which I run though a rock crusher to get gold and diamonds. extra sand is discarded since I already have so much, but could be used for other things.
-now we have 730 steam. with tons of steel, I made 2 steam turbines. this draws 320 steam to generate a max of 100 eu per tick for 41 hours, requiring 198 steel to "recharge". At this point I have gotten my IC2 spec'd friend to build me a mining laser and an MFE in exchange for random stuff I found (forcicium, glowstone, constant peat, etc)
-now with EU generation where it should be for now, and 410 steam left over, I power all my buildcraft and forestry (except the peat bogs) with steam pipes.
I am now trying to set up an infinite rubber tree farm powered by excess dirt from the moistener/carpenter track and maybe a third moistener to keep the mulch coming. at the moment, mulch production is my bottleneck, though I do produce an excess of bog earth. Once the rubber tree farm is produced I plan to turn the extra saplings and extra wheat from the stevescarts farm into biofuel and run a second liquid boiler off that.
Iron production is what fuels the EU and the MJ are free. Should eventually start working IC tech to advanced solar but right now my power generation is more than sufficient to charge my mining laser. As a bonus, when connected machines and storage units are full, steam turbines reduce their output down to 0 and don't damage turbines, so the 41 hours of generation from 198 iron is actually an elapsed time figure - you should really think of it as 1 500 000 per unit of iron, as posted above. Can increase iron generation by following the factorization tech tree, supplied by a network of rails.
tl;dr eats through coal and iron like nobody's business to set up, but provides steam based MJ and EU as well as infinite peat, infinite cobble, infinite dirt, infinite sand, infinite gravel (through pulverization of cobble), a slow trickle of gold, a slower trickle of diamonds, and obviously infinite seeds and wheat.
