Swimming in BC energy - what to do with it?

[dlord]

Hello everyone!

I've been pondering on this for a few days now, but I still haven't found a good answer to this.

Here's my setup: I play on a DW20 server, and I've setup 2 tree farms using steve's carts. Every item produced by those tree farms are well used: saplings and apples are used to make biofuel, and the wood is used to produce charcoal. Biofuel is currently used by 18 combustion engines, while the charcoal is used to power my 36HP boiler, which supplies steam to 14 Industrial Steam Engines. Any excess items are dumped into my overclocked recycler.

I used this setup to power two redstone energy cells for my quarry.

Now that I have enough resources, those energy cells are no longer used.

Right now, I have so much excess energy, I don't know what to do with it.

It seems that BC power has no real use in mid to end game, unlike IC2 power due to the mass fabricator and quantum suit. But I don't want to shutdown my power plant.

Any ideas?

 

[AliasXNeo]

Magma crucibles to geothermals?

 

[budge]

I haven't tried it myself but I've seen suggestions before to turn that MJ production into EU by creating lava with magma crucibles and burning it in geothermal generators. Then at least when it's not in use, your combustion engines can indirectly power your end-game IC2 gear.

 

[dlord]

I actually did try that with 10 magma crucibles, but found the lava production too slow for 10 geothermal generators. Then again, those geothermals are powering both my overclocked recycler and a mass fabricator.

Tough decisions...

 

[Icarus White]

Oh, you have a 36HP boiler?
A more direct (although possibly more expensive) route would be to attach a steam turbine to the boiler - those guys have the same efficiency as the magma crucible > GT thermal generator, but outputs 100 EU/t for 320 steam/t (or about 64 EU/t). This cuts out the magma crucibles from the equation, but then you have to figure out a way to produce 99 steel for each turbine rotor (which apparently lasts several days?) Still, dedicating one pipeline to obsidian -> industrial electrolysis should solve that problem nicely. Wait, DW20, right. Whoops.

The reason people don't usually mention this is that you need a HUGE boiler for this to be even viable. Still, if you think balancing lava crucibles is a hassle...

 

[MilConDoin]

Dive into bees, build all those machines from Extra Bees and use them heavily. This will keep one boiler busy.

 

[netmc]

You will want to run a long powerline for this as this machine is LOUD (place it far from you main area), but you can run a couple of rock crushers from railcraft. When crushing gravel, they have a chance to produce gold or diamonds. They will create gravel from cobble.

 

[dlord]

Thanks for the suggestions everyone!

I'll be setting up a second boiler to see how this goes. I'll probably connect it to my fuel line, and remove all of my combustion engines in favor of industrial steam engines. Let's see how this goes...