3 ms·
Also, farmers have room to put down wind turbines on their land. Quite a few of them up here in northern germany have picked up subsidies and are now generating
by tetha 2y ago
Also, farmers have room to put down wind turbines on their land. Quite a few of them up here in northern germany have picked up subsidies and are now generating power from just a few square meters of land. One larger farming business also has a biogas burner.
With such a setup and a bit of energy storage somewhere, electric vehicles look even more attractive.
- cjbgkagh 2y agoThe tractors I’m more familiar with are 500hp and when in use they run 18+ hour days a very long way from infrastructure. It would be nice to replace those with diesel-electric for maintenance reasons but I highly doubt there is a viable fully electric solution. We would be more likely to find alternatives to plowing and other more efficient farming practices.
- voisin 2y ago> a viable fully electric solution There are already major pieces of mining equipment and trucks for moving mining material that operate on this technology. If it works for them I don’t see why farming would be more challenging.
- cjbgkagh 2y agoI think you'll find that this imagined generality does not go as far as you would like. Mines tend to be on hard ground while farms tend to be on dirt, make a tractor too heavy and it'll get bogged. When the tractor is an hours drive away from the nearest power outlet it just does not seem realistic. Diesel-electric can make a lot of sense, the fuel is the same and it does the same thing but more efficiently and with lower maintenance costs. I don't hate the idea of fully electric, if anyone can make the math work then great, but for the use case I mentioned I highly doubt it.
- bluGill 2y agoMines do this for equipment that operates a fixed track (they can move the track, but not too often). When the equipment is more than a power cord away from a grid connection they use diesel. However electric is so much cheaper than diesel they will go out of their way to have a less efficient mine if it is reasonably possible.
- voisin 2y ago> Mines do this for equipment that operates a fixed track Ok, ignore mines (though I don’t think this statement is universally true), you can find the same examples in forestry where equipment out in the bush runs on electric batteries being charged by small onboard ICE engines, and the logging trucks themselves are switching to this as well. None are on tracks.
- cjbgkagh 2y agoOnboard ICE sounds more like diesel electric than fully electric. The addition of some batteries for efficiency and peak power availability doesn’t change things all much I would still call that diesel electric.
- 8note 2y agoWhat does far away from infrastructure mean? You have to fly in barrels of fuel once a month?
- cjbgkagh 2y agoIt means two hours drive away from the nearest paved road. Massive fuel trucks load up local tanks, smaller fuel trucks fill up from there and take it directly to the tractor in the field, a drive that can easily take an hour on its own. Tractors are slow and usually operating out in some distant field, you can’t bring the tractor to a central point every time you need to power up and you can’t run cables that long for those power levels. It’s really hard to beat diesel for utility.