Efficient MJ AND EU Production?

[540howdy]

I've been using lava to produce EU, but sometimes lava lakes will drain and no more energy
That's for EU though, and I have then been converting EU into MJ through electric engines

I want to learn how to make efficent EU production, and MJ production at the same time

any tips?

 

[Daemonblue]

Biomass/Biofuel and Steam Boilers/Bio Generators/Turbines. If you can make a Biomass facility that constantly stays stocked you can convert it into EU or MJ. If you proceed to turn the biomass into biofuel, you can use the fuel to power a liquid boiler that will produce steam for steam engines (MJ) or Turbines (EU). The problem is setting up a facility where your fermenters and stills are working 100% of the time so you don't lag behind on fuel for the liquid boilers. You should only need about 1 fermenter's worth (running on water) of biomass being converting into fuel to power a max sized HP boiler though, and I suggest heating the boiler a good deal before letting it run automatically(to reduce fuel consumption).

Also, you can burn peat from peat bogs in IC2 generators, so early game you can create one of those and produce EU through generators and use the peat fired engines for MJ.

End game though, you're really going to be looking at solar and nuclear power for EU and boilers for MJ, so keep that in mind.

Edit: Another thing to note, the most recent Thermal Expansion added some new liquid pipes which are like golden pipes on steroids and can function as wooden pipes as well.

Another Edit: Also, if you're NOT using Gregtech, solars are a good deal easier to make so you can get started on those sooner, but with that mod solars become more of a high-end thing as it requires a carbon plate and some Si-Cells.

Yet Another Edit: Was doing a bit more testing on my system and a single fermenter running on water with 100% uptime and power can produce more than enough biomass for four stills, which produce more than enough biofuel to power both a max sized HP boiler and a bio generator with excess fuel (given the boiler is hot enough). If the boilers were hot enough it could probably power another one or two, or several more bio generators for more EU. All you'd have to do is find a method to keep a fermenter running constantly and then you'd produce more than enough energy to run the whole system.

 

[jatie1]

If you need lava, the Nether is your friend.

which are like golden pipes on steroids.

:O

 

[djtlite138]

Make an industrial centrifuge, throw stacks of redstone and cells in it and get the silicon necessary for solar panels. Seriously, once i got to that point and got those upgraded to advanced solars i set down a world anchor and began filling eu storage units. Or if you are willing to brave the hollow hills of the twilight forest to get the maze map focus, make an uncrafting table and begin breaking down forcicium into UU-Matter to make iridium. Set up with an exp farm type mob spawner to continuously break down the forcicium. Then use the UU-Matter to make Iridium. Then use the iridium to go through the lengthy process of making ultimate hybrid solar panels. If you do the work to make 30 and a few IDSUs your EU will be covered forever. Then just use electric engine for MJ generation. Mos of my setups that require MJ will be wired to an IDSU and run like so: IDSU---electric engine---redstone energy unit---- machine. You can then wire up levers with redstone to cut power to the redstone unit seperate from the engine and just turn the engine on only to charge the redstone unit.

 

[Hydra]

Basically what I'm doing is simply use Forestry to generate unlimited fuel (Biomass and Biofuel) and burn that. So for the MJ I simply burn it directly. For EU however, the standard option to use a Biogenerator is really suboptimal since it only generates 32000 EU per bucket of biofuel. MJ can be converted 1:1 by powering a magma crucible and melting cobble into lava which can then be used to power geothermal generators. That way a single bucket of biofuel would result in 200000 MJ which can be converted 1:1 to 200000 EU.

Secondly Forestry also gives you solid fuels like peat and charcoal which also can be turned into Lava this way.

I personally don't use Netherrack because I consider it a too cheap an option and expect it to be nerfed but you could melt netherrack instead of cobble and it would be a much more efficient conversion (8000 MJ in, 20000 MJ/EU worth of Lava out).

 

[Tylor]

Windmill farms are very effective. 3x better than solars, at least.
Tree farms can be very good option too, but now that fillers don't work with saplings, I'm not sure.

 

[K4b6]

Basically what I'm doing is simply use Forestry to generate unlimited fuel (Biomass and Biofuel) and burn that. So for the MJ I simply burn it directly. For EU however, the standard option to use a Biogenerator is really suboptimal since it only generates 32000 EU per bucket of biofuel. MJ can be converted 1:1 by powering a magma crucible and melting cobble into lava which can then be used to power geothermal generators. That way a single bucket of biofuel would result in 200000 MJ which can be converted 1:1 to 200000 EU.

Secondly Forestry also gives you solid fuels like peat and charcoal which also can be turned into Lava this way.

I personally don't use Netherrack because I consider it a too cheap an option and expect it to be nerfed but you could melt netherrack instead of cobble and it would be a much more efficient conversion (8000 MJ in, 20000 MJ/EU worth of Lava out).

So what your saying is a magma crucible hooked up to 3 cobblestone systems could produce enough lava that You could actually make more energy then your using

 

[djtlite138]

Problem i've had with ig ex and mag cruc is that the crucible cant keep up with cobble gen. Maybe if someone could explain how to beat this i'd try it myself

 

[Daemonblue]

So what your saying is a magma crucible hooked up to 3 cobblestone systems could produce enough lava that You could actually make more energy then your using

It takes 20k MJ worth of power to turn cobble into a bucket worth of lava (1000mb). That bucket of lava would only produce 18k MJ if burned in a Magmatic Engine and isn't that effective for fueling liquid boilers (but can be used to heat them up first). However, a Geothermal Generator produces 20k EU per bucket of lava. What this means is for 20k MJ, you get a bucket of lava, which you put in the Geo Gen for 20k EU, making it a 1:1 conversion ratio. Now, Biofuel can be used to produce 32k EU per bucket when using a Forestry Biogenerator. What he's saying is that biofuel can be put to better use smelting cobble for a 1:1 ratio on MJ:EU conversion, not that he's making more energy than he's putting in to the system.

Basically, it's going the round about way of turning MJ into EU, but has a better conversion ratio than the direct way. My only question would be if, bar the cost of the rotor, that 1:1 ratio
beats out a fully heated boiler's ratio using the steam turbine. If his values are correct, and I did my math right, not counting keeping the steel rotors being depleted a single bucket of Biofuel in a fully heated up, max sized HP boiler would produce 454,545 EU. However, this is going by the bio-fuel bucket being worth 16,000 fuel units, as I don't know if the forestry plug-in comes with FTB. This is from the Railcraft wiki:
Forestry Bio-Fuel = 16000 (changes to 32000 if you have the Plugins for Forestry mod installed)

So if the latter condition is met we could get nearly 1mil eu per bucket of biofuel, if my calculations are correct.. The relevant calculations, going by the wiki:

• Base Fuel Usage Per Tick (base) = ( (3.2 - numTanks * 0.04) / ( 16 LP or 8 HP ) ) * numTanks
• Heat Adjust Fuel Usage Per Tick = base + base * (8 - 8 * heat%)
• Steam/tick = ( 10 LP or 20 HP ) * numTanks
• 1 MJ = 5 Steam

The Steam Turbine takes in 160 Steam per tick to produce 50 EU per tick.

Also relevant, that same bucket of biofuel would produce about 290909 MJ worth of steam.

 

[Tylor]

Yes, Biogenerator is nearly useless. But so is Turbine, because it's construction and repair cost is prohibitevley high. You can just make windmills with that iron instead, and get nearly as much EU/t for free.

 

[TheSandwichMakr]

I use a bunch of peat farms. You need 4 dirt for 6 bog earth which each create one dirt when they get turned into peat so dirt is infinite, water using water buckets is infinite and you can make sand using an igneous extruder to make cobble and put it in a pulverizer for sand. Peat can be used in peat engines and generators.

 

[Daemonblue]

Just ran some more calculations related to turbine rotors and wow... If you're using Gregtech and its matter fabricator you're looking at a lot of wasted EU to repair the turbines constantly, and even then you'd use more steel on turbines than you could get from making iron from UUM (5 UUM for 2 ore). Basically, this method of EU generation is probably best left to non-gretech users as it is, indeed, way to damn expensive (660m EU to repair a single turbine with GT, not including the maceration).

What this tells me, at least, is that you can effectively use Hydra's method listed above with using cobble gens to turn MJ into lava into eu, but put a boiler in the middle and use steam engines to up your output by nearly 50%.

Edit: Also, doing some tests with the Igneous Extruders (cobble gens) and just one of those is supplying 10 Magma Crucibles with Cobblestone with some to spare. I haven't expanded it past 10 simply because it's straining my single HP boiler in my test world, but at this rate you could probably have a full boiler dedicated to all the Magma Crucible supplied by 1 cobble gen

 

[Hydra]

I haven't looked into boilers at all since I'm quite new to Railcraft, I do love the iron tanks though But yeah, Daemonblue is correct: I did some calculations recently to figure out the best way to generate EU in a Buildcraft powered system and was quite surprised that there was no 'loss' in converting MJ to EU if you simply used your MJ to melt cobble into lava and use that to fire Geothermals.

 

[Daemonblue]

Another thing to report, after heating up my second boiler...I forgot that one boiler can only give sufficient power to 4.5 Magma Crucibles (HP boiler with 18 engines). However, even with 18 crucibles they still run at about 90% efficiency or so and that single cobble gen is still more than enough for all of them -_- The next problem though is setting up enough boilers to power all the crucibles and then seeing how many generators they can run 100% of the time since 1 magma crucible can't keep a single generator up 100%, but 2 crucibles are overkill.

Other things to note from my testing, a single fermenter run on water can produce enough biomass to keep four stills running constantly with extra, but the fifth still starts putting a strain on the production. A single boiler (as in max size HP) can produce more than enough power to run the fermenter and four stills as well as any farms you would need to keep them running 100%. With four stills you can produce enough biofuel for two max sized HP liquid boilers and still come out slightly ahead after they both have heated up. When you're heating up the second boiler, you'll want at least an extra 200-300k biofuel in your storage tank so you don't drop too low on fuel while it's still warming up. Of course, it should also be noted that one max sized HP boiler can produce 144MJ worth of steam as well, so as long as you keep that in mind you can probably get a much larger production facility than what I'm currently running tests with.

Now to wait for the 1.4.5 update so I can play with the new Liquiducts from TE as some people have said they've been able to move over 500 steam at a time through those pipes. On the wiki though it does say viscosity of the liquid changes flow rate.

 

[540howdy]

Thanks everyone , I think I'm going to take the MJ suggestions since I switched over to the magic pack, and it has no industrial craft
@Daemonblue, magicpack has 1.4.5 of thermal expansion if you wanna play around with it..

 

[mos7wan7ed]

why not use lava from the nether or a myst age to power your eu rather then converting mj to lava and lava to eu?

 

[Bihlbo]

I have a setup that relies heavily on Railcraft and I find it works very well. A tree farm feeds logs into a lot of coke ovens. The creosote goes into a liquid-burning steam boiler and the charcoal goes into a solid-burning steam boiler. Both boilers feed steam to a tank, which feeds the engines for MJ. I could run a turbine too, but for EU I pump lava from the nether (magmatic engine) into an ender tank, then into 9 geothermal generators.

I measure a setup as being "efficient" if it involves as little wasted time as possible. My MJ setup is hands-free with the exception that I sometimes have to collect excess logs; or you can look at it like I always have logs when I need them. My EU setup will need me to move the pump at some point wwaaaayy in the future, but other than that I haven't bothered looking at it a second time.

 

[wolfsilver00]

I find myself with a pump in the nether, pumping lava, for some magmatic engines that run almost 24/7 to recharge redstone energy cells.. then in mid game, i usually make 2 Xycraft 12x12x12 tanks with just cobble.. fill the first with Oil, and feed a refinery with it.. make fuel.. ANd then, combustion engines.. Fuel lasts a lot, i mean it, it's pretty efficient.. You only need to find more oil every 10 hours of gameplay or so.. Then, in end game, i just make a blaze farm with a soul shard and soul cage, make some melee turtles and then i get a lot of blaze rods to feed solid burning steam boilers.. which is my final system.. Of course you could use liquid boilers with fuel.. but i don't like the way they NEED to be given fuel all the time, and as fuel isn't a easy renewable resource, i prefer solid with blaze rods

 

[BoBguyjoe]

For mj, you should make big rooms with melons growing (make the rooms as big as the forestry block that farms melons can farm) use an automatic crafting table to turn the melon slices into seeds, (and you can take some melons slices to eat) then put them in a fermenter to turn them into biomass. Then take that biomass and put itno a biomass engine, also put lava in it. You should do this automatically with pipes and stuff. Note that you will need a little power to power the farming block and for the fermenter, but you can just put a stirling engine in there and put in some extra charcoal or something. If you can, make a couple of these rooms. For EU, nuclear reactor FTW!!! But before that I just went with solar power. I like the biomass way of making mj because i get extra food, and I can get rid of excess wood by turning it into charcoal and putting it into the stirling engine

 

[quadrplax]

I produce EU by burning Redwood slabs that I get from a turtle script