With the following setup, I can extract energy out of the voltorb, and charge the battery with it:

Is there any way to get the energy being imported to show on the display? the gui for the importer doesn't seem to have the slot to allow linking a card to the inputted value.

Ideally you should be able to make a variable which is the energy value the importer pulled that tick, then use that value for things, such as say turning on auxillary power supplies when the existing one hits a certain load.

Nice, Voltorb with an energy capability :-)

This can be done using the Delayer, which allows you to calculate the differential value of the energy level of the battery.

Many people however seem to be requiring such a mechanism, so perhaps I should start looking into a simplified form of the Delayer to calculate things like RF/t, or items/t more easily. I'll think about it.

Ahh, so I need to use a battery for this, is there any limit to what the battey can input/output? I want to have a setup where I have the voltorbs producing baseline power, then turn on a nuclear reactor when I need more, so ideally I will use this as a substation like thing to control my various power systems.

All electric types in pokecube have had energy capabilities since they were added as a thing :D, and this gave me a wonderful way to test that they actually worked with other mods

No, the batteries are intentionally made quite "dumb". I/O limitation can be achieved using the more advanced energy importer/exporter aspects.

For instance, you could read the energy inside the battery, get the history of that value using a Delayer, take the difference of the two latest values to get the increase in last tick, and if that value is too low, power on your other energy production systems.

ahh ok, I didn't even notice a delayer when I was looking through, I guess I should have looked a bit more carefully

how do I go about linking the variable card to the value in the battery?

I have tried crafting the card with it, tried various ways to access it, not sure how to go about linking the card to it.

That can be done using just Integrated Dynamics, not Tunnels.
You have to place a machine reader on the battery, and link a variable to the value of the target in the GUI.

ahh ok, will do that, thanks for the quick response

looking at this, I don't even need the delayer, I can just have it turn on additional power if the battery has a stored value below whatever full - drain is