Re: Electric Farm Tractors

On Aug 1, 12:37 pm, Bret Cahill <BretCah...@xxxxxxx> wrote:
We can hope for all kinds of optimistic developments, fusion power,
everyone cycling everywhere for transportation, etc. but we are 100%
certain of four things:

1. the price of fossil fuel will increase

2. people will want to eat

3. people don't want to use oxen to plow fields anymore

4. it's possible to electrify fields right now

Bret Cahill

Any new technology can be analysed in a way that segments the market
into early adopters who will pay more for the thing than others who
will pay less. So, it makes sense to analyse the market and the
technology for any new energy application. So, if you have something
that uses biomass, there is a certain cost advantage in converting the
biomass sources first - this makes sense. Whether these guys are the
early-adopters, I don't know. It seems like it. I seem to recall
that Ford built tractors before he built cars... or maybe he did that
along with cars. So, the farmers are a group of folks who will adopt
new technology if there's an advantage to it.

Producing hydrogen from water and solar electricity cheaply and then
using that hydrogen in a variety of ways may make sense. You can
provide stationary power from the hydrogen source. You can make
ammonia with the hydrogen and atmospheric nitrogen. The ammonia can
be used as a fertilizer. You can also adapt conventional fueled
tractors and the like to run on ammonia. You can use hydrogen to
hydrogenate low-rank carbon sources - into bio-fuels, or you can use
hydrogen with bio-mass to make other things useful on the farm.


http://www.aceee.org/pubs/ie052full.pdf

Farms represent 1.8% of the nation's GDP and consum 6% of the nation's
energy. So, its an energy intensive business. $196 billion in
revenues and $10 billion energy costs. That's about 2.8 billion GJ
per year.

The US plants some 39.86 million hectares of crops.

A hectare of solar panels generates 6600 GJ per year. So, 422,507
hectares of solar panels are needed to generate the needed energy.
This represents 1% of the cultivated land.

At $10 billion per year recurring cost, the total infrastructure
change cannot cost more than $200 billion to achieve this
transformation. So, we're talking pennies per watt - which is the
problem with all these schemes.

A system that takes off-peak power from baseload plants, like nuclear
plants - and converts it to hydrogen by electrolyzing water - and then
using the hydrogen to make ammonia and convert the tractors to ammonia
fuels - would be an interesting possibility - and using the hydrogen
to hydrogenate low rank fuels into liquid transportation fuels is also
a possibility.

The use of batteries is not recommended. Because the cost of the
battery is some 4,000x the cost of fuel, and you can only charge and
discharge it 800 to 1,200 times before replacing it. So, batteries
actually increase the cost of mobile systems, and because they
discharge heavy metals like lead and sulfurich acid, or nickel and
cadmium or lithium etc... they are a bigger ground water and ground
pollutant than most fuels.

Batteries do have applications - but they're not a panacea - fuel
cells have the potential to be better - but that's only because
they're not mature yet. And so we can always hope! haha.. and other
technologies are a possibility. But they're not ready for prime
time...




.

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