Ways to make energy

[SkyRohirrinn]

Hello FTB community!

I am messing around with alternative ways to make energy on FTB(EU and MJ), I don't want to get stuck with solar panels and nuclear energy, I want something else, something different... I was trying biomass, biofuel, oil, steam, geothermal, mob power(scrap->geothermal) and I am pretty confused now

Can someone please list for me, all the ways to make energy(EU and MJ, redpower energy maybe if there is a way to convert 1:1) in this game?

Thank you for your attention and sorry for any mistake...

 

[eable2]

Don't have time to make a comprehensive list right now, but I'll post real quick some of my knowledge. Hopefully this is accurate; please correct if it isn't!

For redpower, the only two ways I know of to produce energy are thermopiles and solar panels (there are probably more?).
You can convert redpower energy to buildcraft energy using a blulectric engine. I don't believe there's a way to convert any other form of energy to blutricity.
Petrogen allows you to turn buildcraft oil into EU, and forestry's electrical engines turn EU into buildcraft energy. I believe that there is some loss in both conversions.

For buildcraft energy, you're dealing with engines basically. Various engines take biomass/fuel, peat, buildcraft fuel and oil, lava, steam, and simple burnables, sometimes with water required.

For EU, solar panels, windmills, lava, burnables, watermills, nuclear reactors...and if you're playing gregtech, there are lightingrods, fusionreactors, gas turbines (take methane), thermal generators, diesel generators (take fuels), and semifluid generators (take creosote and biostuff), and maybe some other stuff.

Hope this helps.

 

[Bickers]

if you have alot of oil you could turn it into fuel and use petroleum generators for EU 25 eu/t 300k eu per bucket of fuel

 

[RavynousHunter]

Let's see, from the top of my head...

Red Power:
Solar Panel
Thermopile
Windmill (needs to be fairly high up, so you'll want a pair of RP voltage transformers and some high-voltage blue wire)

RP->BuildCraft: Blulectric Engine (can be converted to EU if you tack on the Power Converters mod)

BuildCraft:
Engines, from least to most power: Redstone, Stirling, Combustion; the last one has the chance of exploding if you don't feed it with enough water, 1 Thermal Expansion aqueous accumulator feeds 3 combustion engines adequately enough to prevent explosion, if I remember correctly.

Thermal Expansion:
Magmatic Engine (4 MJ/t, if it gets too hot, will shut down and require a whack with a BC-compatible wrench to restart)
Steam Engine(2 MJ/t, takes solid fuels like coal, has same overheating mechanic as magmatic engine)
Redstone Energy Cell (stores up to 600,000 MJ, adjustable input and output)

Forestry:
Electrical Engine (baseline of 6 EU/t in and 2 MJ/t out, upgradeable, accepts any voltage)
Peat-Fired Engine (1 MJ/t from regular peat, 2 MJ/t from bituminous peat, produces ash)
Biogas Engine (uses water, honey, milk, seed oil, and biomass [from least output to most]; produces 1-5 MJ/t, depending on fuel type, does not accept biofuel)

Railcraft:
Hobbyist's Steam Engine (1.2 MJ/t on solid fuels, 2 MJ/t when being fed steam thru waterproof pipes or liquiducts)
Commercial Steam Engine (4 MJ/t, must be supplied with steam from a boiler or tank via pipes/liquiducts)
Industrial Steam Engine (8 MJ/t, requires external steam source, same as the Commercial Steam Engine)

IndustrialCraft:
Generator (burns anything that works in a furnace, delivers 10 EU/t, burn duration depends on type of fuel used)
Wind Mill (highly variable energy output, very luck-based)
Water Mill (can either be fed water buckets or cells, or be immersed in water; buckets/cells produce more power than immersion, but require more logistics)
Solar Panel (1 EU/t on clear, sunny days; several varieties of superior output available depending on mod addons used)
Geothermal Generator (20 EU/t, require lava; can accept lava from BC pipes, TE liquiducts, or an adjacent BC pump)
Nuclear Reactor (variable, but incredibly high, EU output; highly dangerous, the wrong configuration can turn your base into a smoking crater)

Those are all that I can recall, and mechanics pulled from either the FTB wiki, or the given mod's own wiki.

 

[SkyRohirrinn]

Thank you all for the information! I think I will try geothermal + magmatic engines + magma crucibles

 

[slay_mithos]

Redstone engines don't provide energy enymore, but good list of ways to generate energy in all mods.

Depending on what pack you play on, there are also incredibly expensive generators added by Greg Tech (lightning rod and fusion reactor, if I am not mistaken).
The more advanced solars also depend on the pack (DW20 vs Mindcrack), but in both case, they serve to make solar power provide more energy.

 

[Honza8D]

if you have alot of oil you could turn it into fuel and use petroleum generators for EU 25 eu/t 300k eu per bucket of fuel

I believe you can get more from diesel generator

 

[DoctorOr]

If you're running Mindcrack, or any pack with GregTech, I don't believe that there is any serious way to comprehensively list all power generation possibilities for EU.

 

[jnads]

There are infinite ways to make energy.


If you want the least-maintenance method and have tons of resources:

Advanced/Compact Solar -> Forestry Electric Engine -> Magma Crucible (Igneous Extruder for Cobble) -> Railcraft 7x7x5 tank (5,000 buckets)

From there, the Railcraft lava tank is your "battery" to store energy from the sun as lava. You can use it to generate EU, as well as MJ, (and blutricity?).

You are using the power of time to store energy. 50,000 EU is 1 bucket of lava with this system. There are 24,000 ticks in a minecraft day. So every 1 EU/t of your solar capacity is generating 0.5 lava buckets / day.


Use Redstone Energy Cells as buffers with Magmatic Engines connected by Redstone Energy Conduit. The Engines will throttle back and save lava when the Energy Cells are full. This is a feature exclusive to these three blocks due to ThermalExpansion.

IC2 has its own geothermal generator, and a simple MFE/MFS can output redstone signals when they're full, which you can invert and hook up to the geothermal generator to make power on-demand.

Throw in a chunk-loader, and you shouldn't have to touch a thing. Forever.

This is also remote energy, since you can pipe it anywhere. If you need to power a super-remote IC2 Miner, you can use a bucket or capsule on the railcraft tank valve to extract a bucket of lava. Throw a geothermal generator and plop in the lava and voila, renewable battery.


However, this isn't the funnest.


Edit: Before anyone says "Get lava from the Nether!"...... this isn't SMP friendly. Lava from Nether creates server lag (flowing liquid calculations). You will lag-death your game.

 

[RavynousHunter]

I was thinking of a way to program a mining turtle to supply netherrack for a crucible-based lava farm, something along the lines of...

Chunk Loading Mining Turtle with Ender Chest and fuel, programmed to mine in one direction until its got some amount of inventory slots filled, then, put down the ender chest, put the items into the chest, and have a sorting system in-base to send all your materials wherever you want em to go; sulfur and stuff to storage/processing, netherrack to magma crucible(s), etc.

Only -one- thing...do chunk loading turtles automatically update which chunk(s) they're loading as they move? Don't rightly know, on that one.

 

[Omicron]

Here's a hilarious little tidbit:

Centrifuging rubber wood (IC2 or Redpower, either works) in a GregTech industrial centrifuge costs 25,000 EU and yields methane cells worth 180,000 EU in a GregTech gas turbine. The turbine also returns the tin cells...

You'll wind up with a metric ton of carbon cells. Hey, since you have GregTech machines, are you by any chance electrolyzing bauxite? If so, hey look, you have a metric ton of hydrogen cells too. Hydrogen + carbon = methane. More fuel for the gas turbine! In fact, electrolyzing bauxite gives you so much hydrogen that, after turning it into methane, you get back 225,000 of the 256,000 EU the electrolyzing process costs. And you only lose the one tin cell that contained the carbon.

This turbine is giving me so much mileage right now, it's ridiculous.

 

[Peppe]

Here's a hilarious little tidbit:

Centrifuging rubber wood (IC2 or Redpower, either works) in a GregTech industrial centrifuge costs 25,000 EU and yields methane cells worth 180,000 EU in a GregTech gas turbine. The turbine also returns the tin cells...

You'll wind up with a metric ton of carbon cells. Hey, since you have GregTech machines, are you by any chance electrolyzing bauxite? If so, hey look, you have a metric ton of hydrogen cells too. Hydrogen + carbon = methane. More fuel for the gas turbine! In fact, electrolyzing bauxite gives you so much hydrogen that, after turning it into methane, you get back 225,000 of the 256,000 EU the electrolyzing process costs. And you only lose the one tin cell that contained the carbon.

This turbine is giving me so much mileage right now, it's ridiculous.

I use turbines to power my methane fuel generation -- only takes a couple gas turbines, but all the surplus methane goes to boilers.

Each methane cell can go 3.5 times farther when used in liquid boilers. The set of 4 from 16 rubberwood can generate ~650k MJ and at least that much EU (650k using crucibles -> geothermal, 975k using crucibles -> thermals, and little over a million going right to steam turbines).

 

[slay_mithos]

Nah, don't waste your rubber wood on that...

Use rotten flesh from your tier V zombie spawner instead, it will give a use to this damn rotten meat that you somehow take from their body in quantities.

 

[Bickers]

I believe you can get more from diesel generator

you can but theres not much 25 eu/t 300k total on petroleum to 12eu/t around 380k eu on diesel and the diesel generator dont have a internal tank like the petroleum one

 

[DoctorOr]

Here's a hilarious little tidbit:

Centrifuging rubber wood (IC2 or Redpower, either works) in a GregTech industrial centrifuge costs 25,000 EU and yields methane cells worth 180,000 EU in a GregTech gas turbine. The turbine also returns the tin cells...

Changed in next GT update. It now generates a single methane cell. Still a net positive, but only 20k gain.

 

[netmc]

... And you only lose the one tin cell that contained the carbon.

If you use GT's electric crafting table, you get that tin cell back. In fact, all the tin cell recipes, you get back any extra cells using the GT crafting table.

 

[Omicron]

Electric crafting table, huh?

You learn something new every day

EDIT: Is there any place I can find the fuel value of methane (and possibly other GregTech liquids) in steam boilers?

 

[RavynousHunter]

From what I'm reading on the Railcraft wiki, the only things one can burn in a liquid-fueled boiler are creosote oil, Forestry bio-fuel, and BuildCraft fuel, no mention of anything GregTech.

 

[Omicron]

Since when does Gregorius do anything official about the stuff he adds and removes?

Since I got no answer earlier, I pulled up my test world, threw random GregTech cells into boilers and did some stopwatch and temperature comparison tests. Here's an excerpt from my Railcraft spreadsheet, showing all the fuels I am currently aware of existing (this is a Mindcrack v6 world):

 

[MrSwisstobi]

Well... i like to produce my IndustrialCraft Energy with Solar/Electrical Engines..
Something like that

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