Electricity Generation¶
There’s several options for power generation throughout the game; some are more viable than others, so this is a guide of what to use and when.
Note
All of the fuels described here have their stats described within EMI, by using the “Recipe” hotkey on the combustion or gas generators.
Note
All fuels generate a fixed amount of EU, no matter what the tier (ignoring multiblock generators and their efficiency upgrades). Higher tier generators will consume 4x more fuel than the previous tier in order to meet their output standards. For example, an LV generator will consume one millibucket every half a second of light fuel, an MV generator will consume four millibuckets, and a HV generator will consume sixteen millibuckets.
Steam Power¶
Steam will inevitably be your first power source during the LV tier, and maybe the early parts of the MV tier. Steam is a very thin gas in-game so it’s difficult to scale it for large scale power production; make sure to use the largest GregTech pipes available (Potin or Polyethylene are good options) so that your steam turbines can fill properly.
There’s a few ways of producing steam:
The single-block High Pressure Solid Boiler produces a pitiful amount of steam in exchange for barely using any fuel. These should only really be used to bootstrap the manufacturing of better power sources, or for when you really don’t want to waste any EU for gas water shifts.
The single-block High Pressure Liquid Boiler produces a slightly less pitiful amount of steam but is harder to fuel, as it will only accept Lava, Heavy Fuel, or Creosote.
The Solar Boilers produce even less steam, but they work for free, forever. These are really not useful outside of bootstrapping, but the recipes are there if you need them.
Finally, there are the Large Boilers. There are four tiers of these but the ones you’ll likely be using are the Large Bronze Boiler and maybe the Large Steel Boiler. These generate a lot of steam - when fully hooked up, 400EU/t worth for the Bronze, and 1000EU/t worth for the Steel - at the cost of guzzling fuel like monsters.
The best fuel for these by far is lava as you can get an infinite amount for free with Create’s hose pulley. The Nether will almost certainly have infinite lava lakes and the pumped lava can be fetched through a portal using trains; if you combine some deep underground lava lakes they will be considered infinite by the Hose Pulley too.
Whilst steam becomes unviable at the end of LV, it becomes very viable again in early EV due to getting the Large Steam Turbine. Two Large Steel Boilers can easily power four turbines, and with a basic Chromium rotor these will produce over 1A of IV power between them. With lava being essentially free, this makes steam turbines the practical choice for powering outposts and fuel refineries, or anything else that can’t run off of your main power source.
Fossil Fuel Power¶
Just like in real life, you will likely be using fuels derived from oil and gas for the majority of the game. Fossil fuel liquids are dense, produce a lot of power per unit, and are easy to obtain; from MV and onwards, you use fluid drilling rigs in fluid chunks and distill the results. With the buffs to fluid veins, it’s easy to run entire bases off of a handful of outposts.
There’s a few options as to which liquid fuel you use that varies throughout the tiers:
You can just burn oil straight out of the ground, but it is hideously inefficient. This goes for most combustion or gas engine fuels; they technically are burnable, but it is rarely if ever worth doing.
LPG can be centrifuged from Refinery Gas alongside Methane as a byproduct; as methane is your best shot for hydrogen production (see Hydrogen) you will be needing a lot of it anyway.
One bucket of LPG burns for 320k EU, and one bucket of methane burns for 112k EU, for a total of 432k EU per bucket of refinery gas (minus processing costs).
Light Fuel and Heavy Fuel can be mixed together in a 5:1 ratio to make regular diesel, which burns for a nice 480k EU per bucket. Coincidentally, this is the exact ratio that distilling raw oil will get you. This does require going through the entire aluminium, chromium, and vanadium refining chains in order to build a distillation tower.
Cetane Boosted Diesel is available in HV by mixing a small amount of tetranitromethane and diesel together, which produces a full 720k EU per bucket. You can get by for a very long time with just this as your fuel.
Gasoline burns for a mighty 1.6 million EU per bucket, but has a complex chain of refining requirements to produce. But the real star of the show is High Octane Gasoline - produced produced from gasoline, octane, and ETBE - which outputs a whopping 3.2 million EU per bucket.
A single LCR producing High Octane Gasoline can produce enough fuel to power nearly 40 LuV machines, or 160 IV machines - and that’s ignoring efficiency from multiblock turbines.
Biofuel¶
Biofuels are a fully renewable alternative to fossil fuels. With liquid veins being buffed these are less appealing, but they aree still a somewhat viable alternative; the base materials for biofuels can be harvested using entirely mechanical means, whereas fossil fuels all require drilling wells.
Biodiesel is made from organic oil and ethanol/methanol. You can use fish from the fishery for fish oil or seeds from growable plants for seed oil. Ethanol can be made by fermenting biomass. The sodium hydroxide used to catalyse the reaction can be acquired from your evaporation pools.
Biodiesel producees slightly less than regular diesel, at 256k EU per bucket, but it can be made into cetane-boosted diesel just like regular diesel can at the cost of slightly more tetranitromethane.
Benzene is obtained by distilling wood tar, which comes from charcoal made in the pyrolyse oven or by using an extractor on charcoal. In HV, you can mix it with nitration mixer to get nitrobenzene which produces 1.28 million EU per bucket.
Mechanical Power¶
The best way to get energy out of SU is to use it to make a tree farm, and then make a charcoal burning setup with a fan. Despite that, for small outposts, it may be worth building a windmill and converting it to RF with a Create: New Age turbine. Just remember that it is always worse to use a mechanical diesel engine and convert it to EU with a turbine than it is to just use a combustion generator and an electric motor.
Nuclear Fission¶
Not currently implemented. Check back later.
Nuclear Fusion¶
This is technically available, but it is currently past the content cutoff, so is not supported or balanced in any way.
Alchemical Power¶
Not currently implemented. Check back later.