Energy supply

Having a lot of mods that require RF (redstone flux) power, we obviously need a good supply of it. The modpack offers a lot of ways to generate it.

I chose to diversify the sources, so that if one fails, the entire system (which includes the essential AE2 storage) doesn’t stop.

Lava

Most of our energy comes from a couple of magmatic generators (from Thermal Dynamics), which produce RF from lava. A Buildcraft pump takes lava from the Nether and sends it (through a Thermal Expansion tesseract) to the lab, ready to be consumed by the generators.

It’s really efficient, especially with augments on the generators, but it isn’t infinite: once the pump sucks up everything in its radius (it takes a really long time), it needs to be moved to another place, requiring a (bearable) manual intervention.

Solar power

EnderIO offers some nice solar panels of different tiers. I went with the highest: vibrant ones. They obviously produce only during the day, and not as much as magma generators, but they’re reliable and stackable.

They are really handy since they don’t need any intervention after their placement.

The last hope

Should everything else stop or not be enough, we have an emergency stirling generator (from EnderIO), that consumes classical furnace fuel (like coal). It can be upgraded to be more efficient.

Fail-proofing

Before sending any RF to the machines, I put an energy cell (Thermal Expansion) as a buffer, so that an outage or some other disaster doesn’t shut down everything immediately.

(btw, we still need to make it look esthetically decent, I’m a bit lazy on that front, even though I enjoy doing it)

Future plans

Right now we’re not using much power, but I think the AE2 wireless system will consume a lot more once expanded and upgraded. That’s why I’m thinking of other solutions that don’t require manual intervention, like the solar panels (also because it’s fun building these power systems).

One way is to make use of EnderIO’s zombie generator, which consumes nutrient distillation (that can be produced with a lot of different farmable items, like sugar canes).

Another thought I had was to use the crops farm (made with the Magical crops mod), to cultivate coal to feed into the stirling generator. I still have to see if the farm will be efficient enough.

In this page I didn’t talk about the EU (Energy Unit) system, used by IndustrialCraft², since we haven’t started with its machinery yet.

And also, we haven’t started with Draconic Evolution, which I think will give us many new powerful options.

Anyway, now we have a pretty stable and functional system, that will fulfill our needs for the near future.
I hope the read was interesting, see you soon!