Minecraft – How to switch off certain parts of the EU powered network/machines to conserve power

Two options:

1. Use a Detector Cable. It can accept up to 32 EU/p and emits a Redstone signal if energy is flowing through it. However, it has a very high energy loss (0.5 EU per block).

2. Use the BatBox or equivalent storage unit itself. If you right-click it, you should have a button with Redstone dust on it. Click that until you get the "emit if empty" behavior. This will make the BatBox output a Redstone signal if it doesn't have energy to send. It's smart enough to output a signal if it has some leftover energy, but not enough to send a packet.

Install Bukkit (note: there is no 1.5 version out yet, you will have to wait possibly a week or more) together with WorldGuard and WorldEdit, and a permission plugin if you want to have several people do things what others cannot. If only you need to do special things, you do not need it.

with WorldEdit you can define a cube in the world and then use WorldGuard to define it as a protected region. Then you can add people to the region to allow them to edit it.

You can also simply deny building for anyone with the ModifyWorld plugin included in PermissionsEX and then allow then to build only in certain WorldGuard regions by adding them to that region. That has the advantage that you automatically prevent people building in the wild.