What's wrong with free energy? (even discounting the fact that the machines to gather said energy are not in fact free) Green power is the future maaaaannn lol. I said that because they implement energy storage and transfer the best. Much like actual electricity.
Bah, I got sniped by maintenance, so my post comes a little delayed. Anyway, here's what I was trying to say 15 minutes ago
MFINN23, free energy can be bad because it can (and in IC2's case, very often does) break server balance and economies. Once you have enough solars set up, you don't even need to go into the forest to chop down a tree, you just make wood out of UU-Matter because it's easier than walking a few steps. Creating systems that spit out 1 UU-Matter per 2-3 seconds while consuming zero fuel is among the easier things you can do in IC2. And by the way, getting enough solars set up is not hard, because you can make solars out of UU-Matter too. I know a couple of people who have never even touched nuclear reactors, one of IC2's coolest features by far, because they're all "lol why should I, this one HV solar array here generates more than any safe reactor you can build, and I have 80 of them, and they make enough UU-Matter to make a new one every 15 minutes". It has a tendency to make people lazy, closed-minded and prone to boredom after they're done setting up the same thing they set up on every server and then don't know what to do with themselves and the infinite resources they're churning out. It's basically the same thing that was broken about Equivalent Exchange, just in a slightly less ridiculously scaling manner. Instead of one day it might take you four to get there, but once you're there it works just the same. This is also the very reason GregTech exists (though you can, and many in fact do, argue about the methods GregTech employs).
Also, IC2's energy network is nothing at all like real electricity, and doesn't attempt to be, either. If you want to look at a close (but still not exact) representation of real electricity, look at Redpower's blutricity. Eloraam took a few small liberties in simplifying the model here and there so that it wouldn't eat server tickrate for breakfast, but it's still a good approximation. Also, from what I saw glancing over Universal Electricity's mod environment, they seem to be going for a simulation of the real thing as well. But as I haven't actually played with it, I can't comment on how it works. Note to self: load up the UE modpack sometime.
And finally, note that FTB doesn't have anything to do with the content of the mods. FTB is just a launcher, a community and some config files right now (though in the future they will be building challenge maps as well). The team you want to direct your request to is the Forge team, because Forge is the thing that allows all these different mods to work together in the first place. Forge has already standardized some things - most recently they lifted Buildcraft's liquid simulation out of Buildcraft and made it a Forge core component, so now every mod can easily work with liquids from all other mods and can also easily add liquids of its own that all other mods will be able to work with.
