Energy Unit

EU - Energy Unit is the measure of energy production, consumption, transmission and storage in IndustrialCraft.

These units are not similar to IRL electricity, basically they are "virtual" items, that can stack unlimited amount of times and need storage items like RE Batteries or a Cable network to be used. EU stored in items or devices wont decay over time.

Every Industrial Craft 2 machine is involved in the production or consumption of EU.

EU is not related to Redstone current, but multiple machines can be affected by redstone currents, and a Detector Cable produces redstone current if there is any EU passing through it. Some machines allow a lever to be mounted directly on its block.

Raw EU values are used to measure capacity of energy storage items or blocks.

EU/t
EU/t means Energy unit per tick. If the computer or server is able to handle all ingame calculations, the game will operate at about 20 ticks per second. If this is not the case, the clockrate will drop significantly and you will notice ingame time slowdown. If the clockrate is 10, a second in game will last as long as 2 IRL seconds.

EU/t is used to measure EU consumption and production, EU/t can be measured with an EC-Meter by clicking on any cable two times with some delay.

EU-Packet / Voltage
EU-Packets are the transmission containers of EUs. They represent voltage in Industrial Craft 2. This value has nothing to do with IRL voltage.

EU-Packets come in different sizes ranging from 1 EU to 2048 EU, unlike IC1 you may not change EU output of storage devices.

There is no way to measure what size of packets travels through a cable or machine but they can be read from EU emitting blocks.

Emitters such as generators, storage units, and transformers can emit EU-Packets.

Emitters

 * Generators emit packets as big as their output.
 * Storage Units always emit packets the size of their "out" value.
 * Transformers behave like Storage Units. They are also able to upgrade four packets into one of a higher tier or downgrade a single packet into four of a lower tier, depending on redstone current.

Cables
Cables can carry unlimited amounts of EU/t but only EU-Packets that are the same or below of their maximum Voltage. You can send unlimited amounts of 32 EU-Packets through a Copper cable but not a single 128 EU-Packet. The clue is that energy loss of a cable isn't connected to the total amount of EU/t but to every single packet. So sending 100 32 EU-Packets results in 100 times the energy loss of the cable where sending one 2048 EU-Packet only result in one time the energy loss of the cable. More on that in Voltage Efficiency.

Packet Sizes
A Nuclear Reactor is able to provide power of variable "Voltage" based on setup, the maximum possible energy output is 2400 EU\t. However, note that it can not provide any less than 10EU/packet, as that is the output of a single uranium cell