Just a random musing. As EV’s become more popular, means less gas being used, means potentially lower prices since supply of gas should increase? Or do they just cut production and keep prices the same.
Wondering what will happen in the long term.
Just a random musing. As EV’s become more popular, means less gas being used, means potentially lower prices since supply of gas should increase? Or do they just cut production and keep prices the same.
Wondering what will happen in the long term.
Isn’t farm equipment ripe for electrification? Almost all equipment is used within a short distance of its base.
No. While some equipment stays near a home area, that’s not always the case.
Regardless the energy density of batteries isn’t there yet. A combine can run through 20 gallons of diesel fuel an hour and run for 12+ hours straight. That’s 240 gallons of diesel… and equivalent to 8,904 kWh of fuel used.
There are plenty of carbon neutral alternatives: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/06/worlds-first-ammonia-powered-zero-emissions-tractor-starts-testing/. Diesel and gas tractors will be a thing of the past regardless of how fast energy density in batteries improves.
People steal fuel from farmers. That is a cost.
We would have loved an electric tractor that was always full in the morning and you use your cell phone instead of a key!
If half of our farm tractors were changed immediately, we would have no difference in productivity.
Electric tractors always start in the coldest -40 and require little maintenance. All you do is fix things on a farm, anything not broken would be wonderful!
The common barn will eventually need to be heated to keep these battery’s from freezing. Or have them plugged in all the time I suppose if they have heaters. Will be interesting.
Right, some with Cattle keep the barn warm already.
My EV trucks starts just fine at -40, not plugged in overnight. I am not worried.
short distance is meaningless.
what matters is how much energy is being used and the energy used by farming equipment is huge.
especially large equipment like combines is standing around for months at a time only to be operated 24/7 for a few weeks during harvesting season.
this vehicle category will take many more decades to be realistically switched to EVs.
small tractors could work but even these are operating at high load for days on end and you would need multiple of them so you can switch them out during operation.
I think you mean “short distance is not enough to overcome the other challenges to electrifying farming equipment.”
Short distance is actually hugely meaningful when talking about electrification. Local fleets tied to a base station are much easier to electrify because the base station can be equipped to provide them with power, and you don’t need a distributed charging network.
Farming equipment for field work is surprisingly hard to electrify. In cars you can have your aerodynamic blob slip through the air almost unimpeded. Farming generally requires plowing stuff through soil and that’s very energy intensive process.
You can also think of it in the way how passenger cars generally use just a small fraction of their max power for vast majority of the time (when they are cruising at set speed). Farm tractors and such tend to work for hours on end at 80%-100% of their rated power. So a moderately sized 100kW tractor will need a 1MWh battery to go through a day of work. That’s basically an engineering impossibility without some extreme compromises. Eventually we will have to figure out something (easily swappable batteries automatically ferried between charging station and the tractor? or something), but right now it’s a huge problem.