It's not that hard to come up with cool power sources... Once you go beyond IC2, anyway. Some of the best power supplies out there currently are mainly for RF.
It's just that IC2 has more then enough solar spam. It's Nuclear Reactors are "meh" at best, and a crater where your house use to be at worst. Lava Power is only cool if you use a crazy way to get all that lava.
You've got the efficiency figured out. But we all spread end up coming out of our shells and letting our freak flag fly eventually. My ideal power source is from be killing myself(slowly and never fully) and using the energy released by this to power simple furnace style generators. I sometimes fancy powering my base off of essentia with golems with bowties and fezes running about filling my dynamos with that crazy liquid power.
And occasionally I want to build a full Tokamak Reactor from ReactorCraft and run it at full capacity and use every drop of power somehow.
A great place to look for inspiration(IMO) for crazy power systems is the
Lets See Some Bases thread over in the community spotlight section. They're always coming up with novel ways to run their bases. Or make their bases look awesome.[DOUBLEPOST=1395280038][/DOUBLEPOST]
Making Solar power a tiny bit more complicated is not the same thing as making it more creative.