5 ms·

This may be a stupid idea, but is there any reason that this kind of heavy machinery needs a battery and couldn't just be connected to a power source via a (adm

by cjrp 8y ago

This may be a stupid idea, but is there any reason that this kind of heavy machinery needs a battery and couldn't just be connected to a power source via a (admittedly, very long) cable?

rusk 8y ago
The very long cable sounds like a good enough reason to me ... Agricultural land is typically in remote areas, and equipment needs to be driven for miles often to get to where it's being used. Even if, lets say you do take the hit of the upfront costs introduce a heavy-duty power-grid to service all your land (thousands of hectares on many of the large-scale cases) - then you're still going to have to run the cable from some kind of power point, and without some aerial apparatus you're going to be running it across and through your crops. Yeah I guess you could take the time to arrange the cable, and have somebody follow it around all day but that's a lot of extra work. Probably a lot more work than just the harvesting. It's probably pretty dangerous too - trailing this multiphase high-power cable around where you've all this heavy equipment often doing chopping and grinding.
- usrusr 8y ago
  Someone needs to run the numbers for a modular chain of wire-carrying drones: if you get rid of the batteries, what length of cable could a drone carry? How much power would that cable be able to transmit, how much of that power would be consumed by the cable-carrying drones? Just how light could we make the power electronics to feed the drones from the (obviously, for weight reasons) high voltage power lines they would be lifting? If this is possible at all, it could be an important base technology for a very wide range of new application fields.
  - rusk 8y ago
    That sounds crazy. The kind of heavy duty cabling you're talking about would be very very heavy. Now, you're not only talking about powering your combine harvester or whatever but also an army of heavy duty drones? LOL
  - dmihal 8y ago
    Does it need to be drones? Would it be possible to use a very large cable system, similar to those TV cameras in football stadiums?
    - usrusr 8y ago
      I like the idea, might be the best method to provide power to a consumer moving on a defined 2D surface.
  - tzahola 8y ago
    Good idea. If we could control those drones via a blockchain-based AI, it could be a killer product!
    - thrill 8y ago
      Is there an app for that?
      - tzahola 8y ago
        We’ll write one in React Native.
tremon 8y ago
Or a power rail. Fields are already very regular, I would think it possible to embed a power rail somewhere along or across it.
- nradov 8y ago
  Power rails would be way too expensive and interfere with cultivation.
mikro2nd 8y ago
Very long cables at normal supply voltages (240V/380V) suffer too much voltage drop over any distance (say) >150m. Remember that we're talking of multi-kilometre distances, not a mere hectare or two. Not only that, but anyone who has used an electric lawnmower on a larger area will tell you that cables are a fucking hazard to navigation when you're trying to move a machine trailing a cable. They constantly get tangled, driven over and cut. So anything at a reasonable voltage to run heavy machinery at a long distance from the nearest supply would need to be... I don't accurately know -- ask an electrical engineer for a definitive answer, but... something like 1.1kV. Cable that's sufficiently well insulated for moderately high voltage is /very/ expensive and deadly if the insulation gets compromised. Doesn't sound very feasible to me. Maybe someone with more EE knowledge can prove me wrong -- this is just my gut-feel conjecture. I got kicked out of the EE program at university for being bored to tears by this sort of stuff.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- philliphaydon 8y ago
  We run trains over multiple kilometres with overhead wires why can’t we do it with tractors???
  - ryanmercer 8y ago
    >why can’t we do it with tractors??? Trains run in straight lines, farm equipment has various widths and it's not just 'tractors' and you're going up and down rows of farmland that might be tens or hundreds of acres wide and that aren't always in the shape of a square or rectangle (it's often far easier to work around large glacial boulders or trees for example, as well as ditches/running water/property lines etc). You'd have to string millions and millions, if not billions and billions, of miles of electrical cable across fields. There's 915 million acres of active farmland in the U.S., that's 1.4 million square miles/3.7 million square kilometers. The larger combines can be about 40ft wide so if every scrap of farmland was in literally-square acre parcels you're going to need 5.2 power lines minimum to cover the width of a literally-square acre so you're easily talking 5 million miles of power lines.
samatman 8y ago
Plenty of sibling comments spelling out why not. I want to add that for farm equipment, having a big weatherized battery cube and a crane to swap it is practical. For automobiles, less so.
rini17 8y ago
Not a stupid idea, but it requires whole approach to farming, together with machinery to be reinvented from the ground up. Agrokruh is one example of electrically driven machinery which was already proven to be energetically efficient and profitable: https://vimeo.com/99343531 https://vimeo.com/99343531

by cjrp 8y ago

This may be a stupid idea, but is there any reason that this kind of heavy machinery needs a battery and couldn't just be connected to a power source via a (admittedly, very long) cable?

rusk 8y ago

The very long cable sounds like a good enough reason to me ... Agricultural land is typically in remote areas, and equipment needs to be driven for miles often to get to where it's being used. Even if, lets say you do take the hit of the upfront costs introduce a heavy-duty power-grid to service all your land (thousands of hectares on many of the large-scale cases) - then you're still going to have to run the cable from some kind of power point, and without some aerial apparatus you're going to be running it across and through your crops. Yeah I guess you could take the time to arrange the cable, and have somebody follow it around all day but that's a lot of extra work. Probably a lot more work than just the harvesting. It's probably pretty dangerous too - trailing this multiphase high-power cable around where you've all this heavy equipment often doing chopping and grinding.

usrusr 8y ago
Someone needs to run the numbers for a modular chain of wire-carrying drones: if you get rid of the batteries, what length of cable could a drone carry? How much power would that cable be able to transmit, how much of that power would be consumed by the cable-carrying drones? Just how light could we make the power electronics to feed the drones from the (obviously, for weight reasons) high voltage power lines they would be lifting? If this is possible at all, it could be an important base technology for a very wide range of new application fields.
- rusk 8y ago
  That sounds crazy. The kind of heavy duty cabling you're talking about would be very very heavy. Now, you're not only talking about powering your combine harvester or whatever but also an army of heavy duty drones? LOL
- dmihal 8y ago
  Does it need to be drones? Would it be possible to use a very large cable system, similar to those TV cameras in football stadiums?
  - usrusr 8y ago
    I like the idea, might be the best method to provide power to a consumer moving on a defined 2D surface.
- tzahola 8y ago
  Good idea. If we could control those drones via a blockchain-based AI, it could be a killer product!
  - thrill 8y ago
    Is there an app for that?
    - tzahola 8y ago
      We’ll write one in React Native.

tremon 8y ago

Or a power rail. Fields are already very regular, I would think it possible to embed a power rail somewhere along or across it.

nradov 8y ago
Power rails would be way too expensive and interfere with cultivation.

mikro2nd 8y ago

Very long cables at normal supply voltages (240V/380V) suffer too much voltage drop over any distance (say) >150m. Remember that we're talking of multi-kilometre distances, not a mere hectare or two. Not only that, but anyone who has used an electric lawnmower on a larger area will tell you that cables are a fucking hazard to navigation when you're trying to move a machine trailing a cable. They constantly get tangled, driven over and cut. So anything at a reasonable voltage to run heavy machinery at a long distance from the nearest supply would need to be... I don't accurately know -- ask an electrical engineer for a definitive answer, but... something like 1.1kV. Cable that's sufficiently well insulated for moderately high voltage is /very/ expensive and deadly if the insulation gets compromised. Doesn't sound very feasible to me. Maybe someone with more EE knowledge can prove me wrong -- this is just my gut-feel conjecture. I got kicked out of the EE program at university for being bored to tears by this sort of stuff.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
philliphaydon 8y ago
We run trains over multiple kilometres with overhead wires why can’t we do it with tractors???
- ryanmercer 8y ago
  >why can’t we do it with tractors??? Trains run in straight lines, farm equipment has various widths and it's not just 'tractors' and you're going up and down rows of farmland that might be tens or hundreds of acres wide and that aren't always in the shape of a square or rectangle (it's often far easier to work around large glacial boulders or trees for example, as well as ditches/running water/property lines etc). You'd have to string millions and millions, if not billions and billions, of miles of electrical cable across fields. There's 915 million acres of active farmland in the U.S., that's 1.4 million square miles/3.7 million square kilometers. The larger combines can be about 40ft wide so if every scrap of farmland was in literally-square acre parcels you're going to need 5.2 power lines minimum to cover the width of a literally-square acre so you're easily talking 5 million miles of power lines.

samatman 8y ago

Plenty of sibling comments spelling out why not. I want to add that for farm equipment, having a big weatherized battery cube and a crane to swap it is practical. For automobiles, less so.

rini17 8y ago

Not a stupid idea, but it requires whole approach to farming, together with machinery to be reinvented from the ground up. Agrokruh is one example of electrically driven machinery which was already proven to be energetically efficient and profitable: https://vimeo.com/99343531 https://vimeo.com/99343531