How do you guys do you power plants?

[Omicron]

Interesting. I was pretty sure this applied only to gasses (i.e. steam), which were a special case. King Lemming himself said so.

But well, maybe it was changed. But whatever the reasons, it's good to know that a number of engines this large can be handled by one transfer connection. That'll dispel some worries while designing.

 

[gattsuru]

Steam has a higher viscosity than liquids do, which means that the liquiducts can store more per-duct and flow rate per-connection. The GridLiquid doesn't really map out the network, though, so it can't really understand the concept of bottlenecks and thus flow rate per connection without some pretty significant changes.

 

[JohnTzimisces]

Based on my experience with ultimate 1.1.2, I'm likely going to use thaumcraft golems and ender chests in conjunction with Forestry and IC2 for relatively low-output high-volume EU generation and high output high-volume MJ generation in my next world. I spent far too much effort in my current world early on working toward renewable energy (using windmills and a thorium reactor), may as well go straight for something that is effectively renewable.

More or less, it's as simple as using forestry multifarms to produce wood and saplings which will be put into ender chests conveniently placed near processing stations. Golems will feed saplings (and mulch if I can be bothered to figure out the proper input side) into fermenters. Elsewhere, golems will take wood from the same colored enderchest to an electric furnace (or induction furnace if power generation gets high enough for me to be comfortable with it), where other golems will take the charcoal to plain old generators. I experimented with coke ovens and golems, but I found that in order to keep up with the logging I'd need far more ovens than I'm willing to make.

In my current setup, my only multifarm set to have any sides configured for tree harvesting has only two slots set for wood. I'm using balsa, which at the moment has the highest sapling drop rate (although in the future things are changed in forestry so that different saplings produce different amounts of biomass). Even just using water, this is sufficient for at least 8 biogas engines. In addition, although balsa doesn't produce as much wood as larger trees, and default generators are stupid, I've had little trouble keeping up with power generation, although my current setup only has three generators powering a batbox (meaning the batbox will output 32 eu/t and the generators will input 30 eu/t. The minimum efficient array size would probably be five batboxes being powered by 16 generators giving off 160 eu/t). The rest of my power is provided by solar (about 12 advanced and 30-40 regular), 10 windmills, methane, and BC fuel. Sufficient to run two gregtech machines requiring 128 eu/p simultaneously.

aaaand long post is long

 

[Carbon Acid]

That's a damn lot of water going through a single liquiduct... is this actually stable with all 152 engines at temperature? How many accumulators are you using for that?

I'm asking because I was once told that liquiducts are limited in throughput, with the limit varying based on the liquid... and math says that you should be consuming over 21 buckets per second here.

It's stable,had no issues with it yet. I use like a 100 accumulators for all my water needs and it covers all my water need, including a fusion reactor on full power all time.[DOUBLEPOST=1373568412][/DOUBLEPOST]

I am a big fan of FTB, but some friends wanted to try some other mods, so we made our own private mod pack to tinker with. We started with some solar panels, then went to LV solar arrays for a while. We have the benefit of Universal Electricity, so I could convert to BC power as needed. But, I did the typical pump lava from the nether via BC pump + tesseracts and soon had a 45-magmatic engine setup going. I knew this would be short lived unless I kept moving the lava pump, and our nether is more dangerous thanks to some of them mods we have installed, so I opted instead to use that power to quarry a lot in preparation to build up IC2 power. We now use 3 HV solar arrays that power some IC2 machines and the rest is converted to BC power and powers everything else we currently use. Of course, this whole setup relies on having Universal Electricity, but I could have instead generated lava via magma crucibles and such and kept using magmatic engines if I hadn't had UE available to me. Having fun with it, just set up an automated Forestry rubber multifarm last night, complete with auto-processing of rubber thanks to an overclocked extractor and applied energistics routing rubber wood into the extractor and sending the rubber back to the storage network. Fun times!

It's nice to see people take on mods that are not in the FTB pack and it's nice to see that I'm not the only one

 

[Daemonblue]

Steam has a higher lower viscosity than liquids do, which means that the liquiducts can store more per-duct and flow rate per-connection. The GridLiquid doesn't really map out the network, though, so it can't really understand the concept of bottlenecks and thus flow rate per connection without some pretty significant changes.

FTFY

Seriously though it is important to know that it would be a lower viscosity since liquids (or gases) with lower viscosities than water flow more freely while higher viscosity liquids (like honey or oil) kinda stick and don't flow as easily. Of course that's more for real life since coding each liquid to have a different throughput, at least in the current system, would be difficult.

 

[Grydian2]

Wow I cant believe no one has said this yet. You need to put that all in steam boilers. You are losing energy that way. You would produce more MJ buring that liquid fuel in a liquid boiler and then piping out the steam into industrial steam engines. They produce 8MJ per tick... There is a great forum post that goes into great detail about how much more effecient the boilers are vrs regular combustion engines...

http://forum.feed-the-beast.com/threads/the-final-word-on-steam-boiler-efficiency.13506/

Basically boilers are the most powerful way to produce both MJs and EU. You can either run the steam into industrial steam engines like I said before or you can run the steam into a turbine. This is all from railcraft. Check out the wiki at http://railcraft.wikispaces.com/

Now for me railcraft is a critical part of my power production...

 

[DREVL]

start with 4 stirlings till I get a red power cell up, build a steve cart tree farm, move up to 4 combustions running biofuel until I can fire up my 36 HP boiler, then layout a steam to Magma Crucible to a 8 Geo/Thermal generator setup.

 

[gattsuru]

FTFY

Seriously though it is important to know that it would be a lower viscosity since liquids (or gases) with lower viscosities than water flow more freely while higher viscosity liquids (like honey or oil) kinda stick and don't flow as easily. Of course that's more for real life since coding each liquid to have a different throughput, at least in the current system, would be difficult.

True, and good point. Viscosity in the real world is resistance to flow rate, and thus higher numbers would flow slower. In ThermalExpansion's code, it's an integer value (for the purpose of Liquiducts, clamped between 0 and 200, defaulting to 100), where the flow rate is equal to viscosity, and the capacity of a unit of liquiduct is five times the viscosity times the number of liquiducts in the grid.

That's also the standard going into the Forge LiquidDictionary. Which is just a little confusing.

 

[BlinkY87]

I would like to see which way you go for powering your base and get some new ideas for my new world on the upcoming 1.6.


I use old school combustion engines to power my base. I got a total of 152 engines, of which 76 do biofuel and 76 fuel. It outputs a total of 1064 MJ/tick. I get the biofuel from 2 sugarcane farms and one steves carts tree farm and the oil from a ocean age in which i changed water for oil. It takes over 300 MJ/tick to make the biofuel and fuel.

I really hope to see some new ways of generating power in 1.6 and hope to see what you people use to make energy.

Could you, if possible, explain how you have the bio setup. From harvesting XYZ, to transporting (transporting isn't important for me, per say.)

 

[loboca]

On the plus side, however, it's free!

Once again, solar is OP..

lol

 

[netmc]

I like renewables. I am partial to golem farms with mfr fertilizers and mfr tree farms for the resources.

With the steam upgrades for gt, I plan on running my base on steam almost exclusively.

 

[Airship]

start with 4 stirlings till I get a red power cell up, build a steve cart tree farm, move up to 4 combustions running biofuel until I can fire up my 36 HP boiler, then layout a steam to Magma Crucible to a 8 Geo/Thermal generator setup.

That can't be stable, is it? My tests around this are adamant that it isn't :x

 

[DREVL]

What's unstable about it? This thing has been rock'n for ages. The only thing I might get tired of is getting netherrack. Everthing else is automated enough you forget its even there.

 

[Airship]

What's unstable about it? This thing has been rock'n for ages. The only thing I might get tired of is getting netherrack. Everthing else is automated enough you forget its even there.

Ah, I thought it would be running on cobble. With netherrack, I'm actually pretty sure you can run more than 8 thermal generators off of one boiler... When I did my testing using cobble, there was only a second or so of idle time for the 8 generators before they were filled with more lava.

EDIT: (This is with 1x HP36 boiler, 4x Magma Crucibles running cobblestone and 8x Thermal Generators)

 

[Carbon Acid]

Wow I cant believe no one has said this yet. You need to put that all in steam boilers. You are losing energy that way. You would produce more MJ buring that liquid fuel in a liquid boiler and then piping out the steam into industrial steam engines. They produce 8MJ per tick... There is a great forum post that goes into great detail about how much more effecient the boilers are vrs regular combustion engines...

http://forum.feed-the-beast.com/threads/the-final-word-on-steam-boiler-efficiency.13506/

Basically boilers are the most powerful way to produce both MJs and EU. You can either run the steam into industrial steam engines like I said before or you can run the steam into a turbine. This is all from railcraft. Check out the wiki at http://railcraft.wikispaces.com/

Now for me railcraft is a critical part of my power production...

I know that steam boilers produce more energy then combustion engines, i believe everybody knows that, but i was going for something different.

 

[Carbon Acid]

Could you, if possible, explain how you have the bio setup. From harvesting XYZ, to transporting (transporting isn't important for me, per say.)

I have 2 max sized sugarcane farms(oldschool) with the xycraft soil and a steves carts tree farm(i think its about 30*30), I use AE and ender chests to transport , 2 fermanters and 6 refinery for the biofuel.

 

[namiasdf]

I have something like 80 non-fertilized MFR farms feeding an excess of supply into 6 fermenters run by 8 biogas engines (water/apple juice + sapling/rubbersapling/plantball/compressed + mulch from apples). Biomass fed into 8 stills powered by 8 biogas engines. That biofuel is used to power 160 combustion engines running 32 magma crucibles which is capable of providing 960 EU/t constantly.

 

[Jof16s]

I eventually plan on using this setup. I haven't tried it yet, but I think I can compact it down to a 7x7x7
I have power converters in my current pack, so I can have essentially free power in any form.

EDIT:
Forgot the link:

 

[EternalDensity]

Magmatic array:

Wind:

I use blaze rods instead of netherrack:

 

[DZCreeper]

Never seen the Windmills from pictures 2 and 3, what mod are they from?