That explains the issue I had the other day. With what I found for initial materials an IC2 pump and Geothermal setup was the easiest opening power gen gambit for me (especially since I wanted a plate cast for IE as well), but when I needed to start down the road to RF I ended up doing hours of testing (including digging through the IE configs) trying to get why EU->RF wasn't working using the IE wires before giving up and using Forestry's electric engine as a middleman. That's now my main backup power with AA canola being my main power gen.
That said, on the general drift topic, IC2 is still useful as an early game steel generation method before going to the nether and as a simple and fairly cheap early game grinder and furnace combo.