What are your thoughts on renewable energy?

[thekolo]

The beauty of modded minecraft is that there are dozens of different ways to do the same thing and we can all tailor it to our personal play styles without interfering with anyone else. If I want to use Steve's Carts to tree farm that's okay. If I want to use Nether lava? Well there is plenty for everyone. If I want to make a Wither farm with Soul Shards and get coal I can do it and it's alright!

I hate setting up power systems I just do. So yeah I have my mfr tree farm going into a supply chain which turns the saplings into biofuel and the logs into charcoal. You know why? Because I don't want to go out into the world and move the stupid pump around from one oil well to the next. Nor do I want to keep my quarry running constantly to get coal. Also every time I think of setting up a nuclear reactor I realize that what I want to do is actually anything else. Nuclear reactors just give me a headache. However, that's just me. My friend who loves nuclear reactors well he loves the stupid things and I give him my extra uranium. It is nice to have the option. No one forces you to use it.

 

[DriftinFool]

I think it is a good idea to have in some situations. I just don't think you should be able to have it in a few days. I gave up on boilers a while ago. They made way more energy than I needed. I have switched over to more on demand power with lots of energy storage. My machines don't run 24/7, so making power that way seemed a waste. I had also done it several ways in various builds. MFR farms, old forestry farms, forestry multi-farms, refined bees, etc. But it was still the same steam boiler. I also have used lava a lot too. At least with these setups, they required many parts and lots of infrastructure. They also took quite a while to get all their parts working and then integrated together. Seems like creating crazy automated builds is kinda the point of many modpacks. It would make it hard to automate anything that uses energy if you couldn't automate the energy production itself.

 

[HeffronCM]

I love the idea of setting up a renewable energy system. I just wish there was less focus on tree farms. It seems, because of the ease of turning logs into power and generating infinite logs, that there hasn't been much innovation in that space recently. TE's Reactant Dynamo and the upcoming Extra Utilities Generators are toys I am very eager to play with.

 

[SynfulChaot]

I love the idea of setting up a renewable energy system. I just wish there was less focus on tree farms. It seems, because of the ease of turning logs into power and generating infinite logs, that there hasn't been much innovation in that space recently. TE's Reactant Dynamo and the upcoming Extra Utilities Generators are toys I am very eager to play with.

I'm currently running liquefacted coal from Magical Crops coal plants. I'm interested in Extra Utilities' solar plants, but I'll probably end up with RotaryCraft's hydro gens.

 

[YX33A]

Any energy in minecraft is renewable given enough automation... It's an infinite world so coal is infinite, only thing that comes close to 'non-renewable' is oil but that can be done with bees.

Can we, as a community, get in in our heads that while Minecraft is massive, it is not infinite. Yes, much more massive surface area then the earth(but vastly less depth). But what everyone is forgetting is that Minecraft is Massive, and to go everywhere would take several terabits worth of storage space. Or even to reach the farlands on foot(which would take, what, over a year on one map?).

It's big enough that it might as well be Infinite. But computers don't have Infinite Storage Space, so we can't explore all of Minecraft. And we don't have enough space to even explore all of Minecraft.

I consider something only "renewable" if I can make it in a self contained system with no outside input. This rules out most power sources other then charcoal, variants of Coal Coke, other Wood Products, or any "real life" renewable energy source like Solar Power, Wind Power, Hydro-kinetic, or even making a fat guy run on an oversided hamster wheel to generate some power in hopes that he can get a doughnut.(that last one? I always wanted to make something using that kind of power) Any kind of generator which burns material is only "renewable" if one could automate that in real life, I'd say.

Oh, and Bees are awesome. Cheating, yes, but awesome.(not sure I totally agree with my own statement, but still, Bees producing Uranium?! Yeah, can I call bull?)

 

[Ausyarr]

Personally anything that takes time to gather such as fuel and looking for it I'm going to automate ore replace so i can spend more time building and developing multi machines. I know some of the machines I've created have required 36hp steam boiler and nuclear plants to power, I would never be able to make those multi machines if I had to gather fuel for those plants.

I would all so add that building renewable power sources are multi machines and sometimes there multi mod machines and sometime the funnest machines to make.

 

[KingTriaxx]

Renewable energy is not the goal. I can do it without any problem. The goal is doing it in an interesting way. I've run a hundred blocks worth of red pipe wire, so I could have a gate provide a redstone signal to a Tesseract to shut off a harvester from power when a chest was full. I could have used AE, or other methods, but running that long pipe was the most challenging and therefore enjoyable option. I've done a Steve's Cart tree farm. Not because it was the most effective at the time, but because it was the most fun and cool looking to make. The fact that it produced enough wood and saplings to run two max size HP boilers, was almost a side effect. (A necessary one because of GT power requirements, but still a side effect.) I've found that with Horizons, I need a lot less power than I originally believed I needed. I've got my entire base running on four Engineer's Toolbox Hydroelectric modules. I do intend to expand that, but it's not a... RUSH for more POWER. Like it usually is. I can wait and do other things. I don't need all that power.

 

[Golrith]

or even making a fat guy run on an oversided hamster wheel to generate some power in hopes that he can get a doughnut.(that last one? I always wanted to make something using that kind of power)

Minecraft version would be zombies on a treadmill trying to get at the villagers. Now there's an alternate power source.

 

[Celestialphoenix]

or even making a fat guy run on an oversided hamster wheel to generate some power in hopes that he can get a doughnut.

 

[Democretes]

I would just like to point out, that the only real non-renewable energy source (currently) is Force gems. Oil and lava spawn in such large quantities and are so frequent, it's hard to consider them non-renewable. An oil well can power engines or a boiler for days, and a lava lake in the nether can last for weeks. The only "non-renewable" part of oil and lava is that you have to reset the pump every once in a while. Force gems, on the other hand, require extensive digging to get a decent amount and even then they still get used up pretty fast.

 

[Celestialphoenix]

I would just like to point out, that the only real non-renewable energy source (currently) is Force gems. Oil and lava spawn in such large quantities and are so frequent, it's hard to consider them non-renewable. An oil well can power engines or a boiler for days, and a lava lake in the nether can last for weeks. The only "non-renewable" part of oil and lava is that you have to reset the pump every once in a while. Force gems, on the other hand, require extensive digging to get a decent amount and even then they still get used up pretty fast.

Theres a UUM recipe for force gems

 

[Democretes]

Theres a UUM recipe for force gems

True, but I don't consider UUM to make anything "renewable" as the power input is exponentially higher than what you actually get. If you powered your base with force gems, you wouldn't be able to use UUM to make enough to power your base.

 

[KingTriaxx]

Force gems are not, but force itself is because logs and saplings can be squeezed for force, or rather they could in 1.5. Don't know about after that.

 

[netmc]

My thoughts on renewable energy:

I only ever use renewable energy to power my base at idle. I will use non-renewables as a booster to get a bit more power when I need it, but for everything that would run 24/7 on a server, it is renewable only. When I play in single-player, I don't care as much as the world stops when I log out. If I have a nice supply of oil or lava built up, I'm fine. Sometimes life happens and I'm not able to come back to my world right away. I don't want for it to take 5+ hours to reheat each boiler, and find my farms are overflowing everywhere, and my storage is completely full. One of the reasons I liked GT so much with 1.4.7 and 1.5.2 is that it provided a way to turn almost any machine output into fuel of some sort.

 

[Zenthon_127]

My thoughts on renewable energy:

I only ever use renewable energy to power my base at idle. I will use non-renewables as a booster to get a bit more power when I need it, but for everything that would run 24/7 on a server, it is renewable only. When I play in single-player, I don't care as much as the world stops when I log out. If I have a nice supply of oil or lava built up, I'm fine. Sometimes life happens and I'm not able to come back to my world right away. I don't want for it to take 5+ hours to reheat each boiler, and find my farms are overflowing everywhere, and my storage is completely full. One of the reasons I liked GT so much with 1.4.7 and 1.5.2 is that it provided a way to turn almost any machine output into fuel of some sort.

I use renewable energy in the form of Forestry Force Tree farms. However, I make sure any byproducts (like tons of wood) are kept in MFR Deep Storage Units, so I never have to worry about overflow.

 

[netmc]

I use renewable energy in the form of Forestry Force Tree farms. However, I make sure any byproducts (like tons of wood) are kept in MFR Deep Storage Units, so I never have to worry about overflow.

The only downside to the forestry farms is that it requires apatite, which is non-renewable until you get the apatine bee.

 

[Zenthon_127]

The only downside to the forestry farms is that it requires apatite, which is non-renewable until you get the apatine bee.

I'm using MFR Fertilizer crafted into Forestry Fertilizer, so that isn't really an issue.

 

[Democretes]

Force gems are not, but force itself is because logs and saplings can be squeezed for force, or rather they could in 1.5. Don't know about after that.

I'm just considering Force gems. I've used Force trees in Forestry tree farms to power my base and I will say they can produce a ridiculous amount of power.[DOUBLEPOST=1389499364][/DOUBLEPOST]If you do consider it being just liquid force, and not just force gems, then there are no non-renewable energy sources in minecraft.

 

[Siigari]

I think IC2 made feel like I always needed more power. Another overclocker upgrade, another solar panel, more power for more quarries, etc.

All I miss now are PowerConverters. I have almost completely ignored IC2 in my Monster play.

 

[Petrus]

I know there's been a fairly strong push in the modding community to have machines use some kind of power constantly even when not in use.

The problem with this idea, is that it is hell for server hardware. I'm sitting on a quad core i7 at 3.6 Ghz, with 8 Gb of RAM, and an nVidia GTX 480 video card with 1.5 GB of RAM. I have Vsync on in order to prevent the card melting in hot weather, but even so, 16 heat generators from Mekanism, with a Power Cube/Ender IO Capacitor adaptor, and a couple of OpenBlocks tanks, slowed my framerate by around 13 FPS.

Passive, renewable power generation means that it is always on, which in turn means that it is always making calculations and pinging other things, which in turn is going to translate into lag. I understand that the community is suicidally balance obsessed above all else, but the key to reducing lag is designing machines for the game, which get turned off when you are not using them. I also know that there is deep paranoia about redstone clocks and lag, but my own testing indicates that a slow counter ends up being more efficient if you know exactly what your processing count is going to be. Set up your counter for the number of items you have, let it run, and then if you're using redstone controlled machines such as TE's, said machines get turned off when you are not using them.

Likewise, for computer efficiency it also makes sense for people to only produce the amount of materials they need for a given project, rather than having a giant amount of pre-made resources around, and smelting/processing constantly. From my testing, energy batteries/batboxes are some of the most lag-intensive blocks, which again makes sense, because of the constant calculation and pinging they need to do, if they are plugged in.

With a hobbyist steam engine from Railcraft, you're getting at least an additional 50-66% burn time from coal, than simply sticking it in a vanilla furnace. With six hobbyist/single LP boiler pairs, three stacks of coal will give me 12 MJ/tick for an hour of real time, with virtually no inefficiency due to initial heating. That is more than enough for me to dig a single 9x9 strip mine with a quarry, in most instances; and if I put an Ender IO battery on the same circuit, I can throttle the quarry at around 5-6 MJ/tick, which is still all it really needs, and conserve the rest.

After that, it gets turned off.