How do YOU Generate Power?

[Pyure]

I get the most enjoyment from ReactorCraft for over-the-top power generation. I just recently learned that I can keep two low pressure steam turbines going with the waste heat from a gas turbine running at 25% speed. So I'm getting 1.897GW from a bit of lubricant and jet fuel both of which are quite easy to automate. For those that aren't familiar with RotaryCraft and ReactorCraft, if I converted this power to RF it would be 3,648,076RF/t.

https://forum.feed-the-beast.com/threads/1-897gw-from-a-throttled-gas-turbine.164248/
Awwwww Yeah!

A gas turbine shouldn't produce enough waste heat to produce that much power full time. In theory its already maximizing its energy output potential as a generator. (That much heat would, I dunno, melt the turbine?)

 

[ChemE]

A gas turbine shouldn't produce enough waste heat to produce that much power full time. In theory its already maximizing its energy output potential as a generator. (That much heat would, I dunno, melt the turbine?)

Now that I've pointed it out, I'm sure Reika will nerf it six ways to Tuesday but for the time being I'm going to marvel in its OP'ness. This evening I'm going to see if a gas turbine with an afterburner will keep a high pressure steam turbine going. I'm betting it will...

 

[ChemE]

Yup, an afterburned gas turbine throttled to 25% speed can keep 10 steam boilers at the sweet spot temperature for ammonia. So 12.78GW of power can be wrung from one gas turbine running at 25% which ordinarily would be putting out a scant 33.5MW with the same upgrade/speed.

 

[Inaeo]

Yup, an afterburned gas turbine throttled to 25% speed can keep 10 steam boilers at the sweet spot temperature for ammonia. So 12.78GW of power can be wrung from one gas turbine running at 25% which ordinarily would be putting out a scant 33.5MW with the same upgrade/speed.

I applaud your brokenness. Enjoy it while it lasts.

 

[TomeWyrm]

To be fair, jet engines (which is what the gas turbine was designed after unless I'm horrifically mistaken) do produce quite a large amount of waste heat. That's why afterburners are effective. They add more fuel to the already blazing hot exhaust and create even more thrust for very little effort (and a dramatic loss in efficiency, but for the short periods you use them for in real life, that's generally an acceptable trade-off).

That being said, I too don't think that level of heat should probably be able to generate power from a steam turbine. Both for realism and game balance reasons.

Paging @Reika.

Also as a secondary question for Reika, was the gas turbine modeled after a turbojet or a turbofan?

 

[Your mom]

On project ozone I made a simple 10x10 platform made of tier 10 solar panels that were maxed out for upgrades

 

[Reika]

To be fair, jet engines (which is what the gas turbine was designed after unless I'm horrifically mistaken) do produce quite a large amount of waste heat. That's why afterburners are effective. They add more fuel to the already blazing hot exhaust and create even more thrust for very little effort (and a dramatic loss in efficiency, but for the short periods you use them for in real life, that's generally an acceptable trade-off).

That being said, I too don't think that level of heat should probably be able to generate power from a steam turbine. Both for realism and game balance reasons.

Paging @Reika.

Also as a secondary question for Reika, was the gas turbine modeled after a turbojet or a turbofan?

A turbofan in appearance, and a turboshaft in function. Also, I already fixed the exploit.

 

[Guineafluff100]

I dont have a picture, but I use a huge Big Reactor that is cooled with cryo and has the reactor control program on a computer next to it.

 

[bumbalaga]

I'm playing with friends on a server that's running 24/7.
We've built one reactor in the floor (20x20x20) that takes care of making sure that both of our emergency batteries are charged. Once they reach full charge, the reactor turns itself off.
Quite simple, but effective.

Spoiler

 

[RyokuHasu]

In my skyblock world I was lucky enough to find a slime chunk, so far I made a 3 tiered slime reactor for Botania. the top layer moves slimes to my farms to power the sped up growth of crops for my IE Diesel Generator. The other 2 layers are setup to transfer mana to all my mana pools.

So I'm running my world off a slime chunk lol

Spoiler

 

[Robijnvogel]

I'm playing with friends on a server that's running 24/7.
We've built one reactor in the floor (20x20x20) that takes care of making sure that both of our emergency batteries are charged. Once they reach full charge, the reactor turns itself off.
Quite simple, but effective.

Spoiler

Wouldn't turbines running off of a steam-based reactor be much more efficient? You could also use the steam to generate some other types of power.

I had my Big Reactors Turbines powering MFR Laser Drills, generating more than enough Yellorium and Uranium to power the Big Reactor producing the steam, making for a self-sustaining energy system that produced tons of other ores as a side-product. A reason why I decided not to include either of those mods in my latest modpack.

IC2, Nuclearcraft, Mekanism and Reactorcraft reactors are probably more interesting to work with and balance.

I must say that that room looks awesome though.

 

[RyokuHasu]

Wouldn't turbines running off of a steam-based reactor be much more efficient? You could also use the steam to generate some other types of power.

I had my Big Reactors Turbines powering MFR Laser Drills, generating more than enough Yellorium and Uranium to power the Big Reactor producing the steam, making for a self-sustaining energy system that produced tons of other ores as a side-product. A reason why I decided not to include either of those mods in my latest modpack.

IC2, Nuclearcraft, Mekanism and Reactorcraft reactors are probably more interesting to work with and balance.

I must say that that room looks awesome though.

While I personally love the Mekanism fusion reactor the most it is behind a massive tech tree to even get the basics of it going it's also Biome and Sunlight reliant. It needs sunlight to do most of it's processing actions for the fuels and it needs to be in a biome that is not cold, or evaporation plants will not work. It works best in hot desert biomes. But once you get one going it can be scaled to be completely self-sufficient requiring only water at an input for all it's fuels.

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Eh, Mekanism is... set to a completely different power scale than the rest of my pack for 1.10.2, so I had to give it the old heave ho. From early ore tripling and steel production AND jetpacks AND... well, needless to say, the mod is very front-loaded. Which is scary considering the back-half of the mod is all about ore quintupling and beating Deep Resonance for 'most power generated from a single generator'.

Between the generators and the steel, it really puts a cramp in Immersive Engineering's style. And honestly, Immersive Engineering is probably the first mod (outside BTW) which does wind and water power in a manner which I approve. Not a whole LOT of power, but reliable power. If there was one thing I wished Immersive Engineering would make, it would be a mid-tier generator which would produce in the 100-250 RF/t range. The jump from spamming wind and water and thermal at around 25ish RF/t each to the Diesel Generator at 4kRF/t is pretty huge. An intermediary step would be most welcome.

In 1.10.2, Immersive Engineering is how I'm doing most of my power generation, with high-end generation being done by Deep Resonance.

 

[Robijnvogel]

People. Does someone here know of a real-life possible way to generate power by deteriorating metals (making them rust, or something like that).
If so, a mod implementing a feature like that, would be greatly appreciated. (I have my reasons . @jdog1408 knows what's up.)

 

[KingTriaxx]

The trouble with a mid-level generator in IE, is that it doesn't have a machine of it's own that consumes power in that range. It has multiple machines that run together that consume that kind of power, but not a single machine. Possibly the best option would be a multi-block dynamo, as a step up from the basic one you plug wind and watermills into.

Not a big fan of Deep Resonance. I either don't need the kind of power it provides, or if I do, I'm not willing to waste it because the power is an unrenewable resource. To keep it going, I have to continually burn the power to mine more of it's ore to keep the power going. Unless the math is different from what I've seen, the top end output is 12k RF/t per crystal? I'd rather run three Diesel Generators instead. No strange refinement, no burning resources on a non-refundable power system, no horrible side effects with which I have to try and run the system to rapidly build a containment structure.

 

[RyokuHasu]

Eh, Mekanism is... set to a completely different power scale than the rest of my pack for 1.10.2, so I had to give it the old heave ho. From early ore tripling and steel production AND jetpacks AND... well, needless to say, the mod is very front-loaded. Which is scary considering the back-half of the mod is all about ore quintupling and beating Deep Resonance for 'most power generated from a single generator'.

Between the generators and the steel, it really puts a cramp in Immersive Engineering's style. And honestly, Immersive Engineering is probably the first mod (outside BTW) which does wind and water power in a manner which I approve. Not a whole LOT of power, but reliable power. If there was one thing I wished Immersive Engineering would make, it would be a mid-tier generator which would produce in the 100-250 RF/t range. The jump from spamming wind and water and thermal at around 25ish RF/t each to the Diesel Generator at 4kRF/t is pretty huge. An intermediary step would be most welcome.

In 1.10.2, Immersive Engineering is how I'm doing most of my power generation, with high-end generation being done by Deep Resonance.

A thermoelectric generator farm would probably your best bet for medium range just grid out lava and packed ice with a generator in between each one. This can be easily up scaled and provide decent mid-range power.


And yep the power generated from the mekanism fusion reactor is massively insane but requires a entire biome filled with infrastructure to keep it running at max in a self-sustained way.

That's where I think Mekanism is kinda balanced, you need massive scale infrastructure to keep top tier stuff running. tens of Evaporation plants, tons of heavy water pumps, a heap of Solar Neutrino activators, And not to mention a massive laser array to even jump start the fusion process (true to real life, you need a crap ton of energy to get a fusion reaction going) which requires a pretty good already existing power supply to charge up.

 

[Someone Else 37]

People. Does someone here know of a real-life possible way to generate power by deteriorating metals (making them rust, or something like that).
If so, a mod implementing a feature like that, would be greatly appreciated. (I have my reasons . @jdog1408 knows what's up.)

Well, rusting is an exothermic process (which is why it... well... happens), so in theory you could extract energy from it... but it's quite slow, so you wouldn't be able to get much energy out of it.

Although there is the method by which hydrogen was first created, by running a little bit of water through a heated iron pipe. The iron pulls oxygen from the water, creating iron oxide (aka rust) and hydrogen gas. You could then burn the hydrogen, either in a combustion engine of some sort or a fuel cell. But I still don't think you'd be able to get much energy that way. You'd burn through iron pipes pretty quickly, which is a problem, although you could smelt the oxide back into iron metal... but doing so would require at least as much energy as you'd get back by rusting the pipe. The second law of thermodynamics strikes again.

And then there's thermite. A mixture of powdered iron oxide and aluminum metal that, when ignited, rather quickly turns into an extremely hot sludge of aluminum oxide and iron metal that will melt through most any container you put it in. And if you ignite thermite atop a block of ice, the heat vaporizes the ice, and then the iron steals oxygen out of the water, creating lots of hydrogen gas very quickly, when then mixes with oxygen in the air and explodes. It's pretty impressive. Look it up on YouTube.

There's also the reaction between alkali metals (lithium, sodium, potassium, rubidium, cesium, and francium (though not usually francium because it's extremely radioactive) (yes, I memorized those)) and water. They, too, steal oxygen atoms from water, releasing hydrogen and a lot of heat, causing boom. In addition, they all have very low melting points (just a little bit above room temperature), so they'll melt pretty quickly when in contact with water, so then all kinds of bubbles and stuff form in the liquid metal, so the surface area goes way up, so the reaction rate goes way up, so the amount of heat and hydrogen gas produced goes way up, so boom. Again, it's all over the YouTubes.

I have heard that some torpedoes use a much more tightly controlled version of this sort of reaction to power their propellers (which makes sense- I mean, one of the reactants is water, after all), and that NASA is investigating using it to power spacecraft because they're running out of plutonium to make RTGs.

The only problem with using this sort of thing as a power source is that none of these metals appear in the earth's crust as native metals- they're all oxides or silicates or something like that. You use energy to smelt the ore, removing the stuff that's not metal, and leaving the metal behind. All of the above processes simply reverse that process, so at best, they could be used as batteries. Quite potent batteries, to be sure, but you're never going to get out more energy than you put in.

Also, FYI, I am aware of your Void of Magitech modpack and its overcomplicated and thoroughly ridiculous metal-generating cycle. All of those machines (on the tech side, at least) use energy, and I'd imagine quite a lot of it. No mod that attempts to generate energy from refined metals via a chemical process in an even slightly realistic way could ever produce nearly enough energy to power even the tech steps.

Uranium, though...

 

[TomeWyrm]

Minecraft laughs at the second law of thermodynamics.

Also anyone that considers Mek to be in competition for "most" on anything hasn't seen enough modded Minecraft. Draconic Evolution beats it on everything except ore processing (where it's the second-spot contender from all the mods I know. Five times multiplication is pretty high). But frankly? One word: Reika. Reactorcraft kicks mekanism and even Draconic Evolution in the TEETH for power generation. Rotarycraft makes Mekanism's ore multiplication look like a cute toy. Chromaticraft's quarry makes the digital miner look like someone hooked a snail up to a train and waited for the locomotive to move.

 

[Scottly318]

@Someone Else 37 the tech of that torpedo you mentioned is sulfer hexafloride sprayed over lithium. I couldn't find who uses that tech but it is a thing

Edit: the U.S. mark 50 uses this propulsion system

 

[Hurst_Quayzar]

Present Power Generation... I was hoping to eventually replace the Magma Crucible's with Lava Fabricators. Have these been nerfed? don't want to waste my time if so.