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from the so-the-green-tractor-is-going-green? dept.
John Deere has released a video of an all-electric concept tractor in the lead-up to the SIMA Agribusiness show in France, pointing the way toward a zero-local-emissions tractor product in the future.
In some ways, tractors seem like an ideal candidate for electrification. Electric motors are great for generating the kinds of huge torque figures tractors require, and tractors are generally fairly short range vehicles that live in the same shed every night, making for convenient recharging. They're also very low-maintenance in comparison with diesel gear.
That's the thinking behind John Deere's SESAM (Sustainable Energy Supply for Agricultural Machinery) tractor, a gutted out JD 6R with a huge battery bank up front and dual electric motors developing up to 130 kilowatts (174 horsepower) of continuous power.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by bradley13 on Saturday December 10 2016, @10:23AM
At least they're honest, with the zero "local" emissions stuff. Because that electricity is going to come from somewhere, and the whopping batteries required by a tractor use lots of interesting materials dug out of someone's back yard, and processed in someone else's back yard.
Frankly, I am increasingly convinced that hydrocarbons are just about the best fuel solution we have. We already have the infrastructure to distribute them, they burn nicely in all of the (mature technology) hydrocarbon engines that we have. Why not put renewable energy source to work producing hydrocarbons, i.e., using them as the storage medium?
Too many renewable energy types are determined to reduce everyone's standard of living. People are not going to accept this. Just as an example: There's a local project to convince people to let their heating be controlled by the availability of renewable energy on the grid. So, during the day, your house heats up because there's plenty of solar energy. During the evening and night, you're then not allowed to heat. If you have a house with average insulation, you would spend half your time hot, and the other half cold. People are not going to accept this crap - this is not the way to sell renewable energy.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Aiwendil on Saturday December 10 2016, @10:40AM
Both RME and HVO diesel (both renewable) are common here in sweden (two thirds of public transport (87% in stockholm county) runs on renewable fuels [incl ethanol])
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 10 2016, @04:24PM
Both RME and HVO diesel (both renewable) are common here in sweden (two thirds of public transport (87% in stockholm county) runs on renewable fuels [incl ethanol])
Wait, wait, wait, wait.
Ethanol-fueled is Swedish?
*grin*
(Score: 3, Informative) by BsAtHome on Saturday December 10 2016, @10:46AM
The real problem is that if all people in the world use the same amount of energy as we have become used to in the "west", then this earth is not big enough. Either you have to do with less and share, or you actively deprive your fellow earthling the privilege you enjoy. The sum of energy consumption for all of earth's population, regardless how we get it, is a finite measure. We have already been using more than is good for us using fossil fuels.
So, either you reduce your consumption to your fair share(*) or you keep the competition down by depriving it from a fair share. I guess the latter will not be looked upon with great enthusiasm by those you deprive.
(*) fair share is defined as the amount the earth can sustain for the global population divided by the population.
(Score: 2) by aiwarrior on Saturday December 10 2016, @11:13AM
Or you know, You compensate the increased numbers earthlings with better efficiency all around, just a possibility... Maybe recycling becomes economically more practical also, just...another possibility before Eugenics or mass economical control a-la Sovietic style.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by TheLink on Saturday December 10 2016, @04:16PM
You compensate the increased numbers earthlings with better efficiency all around, just a possibility
There's a limit to how much efficiency will get you, unless you mean efficiency as in not actually doing certain stuff in the first place or not having those extra humans.
1) If everyone wants 1kW of cooling/heating, better heatpumps may work but there's a limit of how efficient they can get. You are not going to be able to get 1000W heating/cooling with 10watts of power.
2) If everyone wants a car of a certain level of capacity and safety, it will consume significant amount of energy and resources.
If I don't have children I can drive a Humvee for the rest of my life and still use less total resources than someone who had 2 children who each had 2 children who each had 2 children etc. Even if those children only rode bicycles around. My footprint would be "wide" but it would be very short.
However assuming we don't take the population reduction path, there are two non-exclusive solutions to the problem of having a high population:
a) Get off this planet and use other resources
b) Convincing/conditioning the masses to be satisfied with virtual Circuses. The Bread has to be real but the Circuses don't.
Option a) is not really that possible at the moment and it would actually take too much resources to get billions of people off the planet- it would be more of off-planet population growth in space colonies.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 10 2016, @04:32PM
"1) If everyone wants 1kW of cooling/heating, better heatpumps may work but there's a limit of how efficient they can get. You are not going to be able to get 1000W heating/cooling with 10watts of power."
You can share that 1kW of cooling/heating. Kind of inevitable, with higher population density.
"2) If everyone wants a car of a certain level of capacity and safety, it will consume significant amount of energy and resources."
Public transportation. Also works better with higher population density.
In a lot of cities a car is not very useful. Parking, traffic congestion. On the rare occasions that you actually need a car (say, a family trip), you can rent one. It's the low-density areas that need cars.
Both of your points are kind of self-correcting. Feeding or smartphones would be much better examples, IMHO :)
(Score: 3, Touché) by Unixnut on Saturday December 10 2016, @08:06PM
> On the rare occasions that you actually need a car (say, a family trip), you can rent one.
This is constantly trotted out as a realistic option, when it isn't. For example. I live in the centre of one of the denser cities on earth. Nobody I know (apart from me) has a car, including the entire company I work for. There just isn't the space for it, and the congestion is such that you can get around faster on foot or by bike.
The solution to needing a car was what you described, car rentals. Things like "zipcar" came around. The problem with renting a car when you actually need one, is that you will find everyone else needs one at the same time.
For example. weekends. People don't take a family trip during the week, kids are at school and parents are at work. However weekends is when everyone want a trip.
What usually happens is that the cars sit unused almost all the time, and then 5% of the time everybody wants one. So what is the solution? Either you have enough cars on standby to satisfy peak demand (in which case you have not solved the congestion thing at all, just changed who owns the cars) or you use surge pricing to decide who gets to use the car (which will result in people just saying "screw it" and buying their own cars).
And it isn't just with car rentals. I was carless for a few months, and in theory I always have a public transport , cab or uber equivalent nearby. Problem is, say on a Friday night I want to go out to a friends place (out of range of public transport). Guess what, everything is booked, unless I wanted to wait 45 minutes for a 15 minute car journey, and even then there is no guarantee they would actually show up in 45 minutes, or show up at all in fact. .
When you need a car most, tends to be when everyone else needs one. So the "shared commons" thing really isn't going to work out.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 10 2016, @12:21PM
How about the third and most-obvious solution? Reduce the population.
If we don't do it voluntarily, then there will always be a large part of humanity that is suffering. Eventually disease, pestilence, and famine will keep our numbers in check if we don't.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 10 2016, @12:50PM
clearly the answer is carpet bombing poor countries.
if you kill everyone nobody will be left to complain.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 10 2016, @01:21PM
That's already happening.
And it's happening because we are already fighting over resources.
Because we already have too many people.
Checkmate.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 10 2016, @01:27PM
Apparently Germany already has a few industrial plants using the Sabatier reaction to produce methane from carbon dioxide and hydrogen gas produced from water electrolysis from excess renewable electricity.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 10 2016, @02:08PM
It only runs on John Deere Electricity (tm).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 10 2016, @03:42PM
> If you have a house with average insulation, you would spend half your time hot, and the other half cold.
Which is why, in your own damn country, building codes for insulation have been significantly improved over the last couple of decades.
But mentioning that kind of undermines your entire argument doesn't it?
Your intellectual dishonesty is pretty damn tiring.
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Saturday December 10 2016, @04:14PM
"Which is why, in your own damn country, building codes for insulation have been significantly improved over the last couple of decades. But mentioning that kind of undermines your entire argument doesn't it? Your intellectual dishonesty is pretty damn tiring."
The thing is, dear AC: we do not raze and rebuild the country every couple of decades. The building I live in is 80 years old. I went shopping this morning, in two stores: one of those buildings is less than 10 years old; the other one is over 300 years old. Retrofitting insulation only works to a limited extent, especially on the oldest buildings.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 10 2016, @05:26PM
> I went shopping this morning, in two stores: one of those buildings is less than 10 years old; the other one is over 300 years old.
So half the buildings were appropriately insulated to make this voluntary scheme work.
When your own examples undermine your point you've pretty much lost the argument. Dear.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday December 10 2016, @07:20PM
Well, the better way to do that would be to have a big, well-insulated tank. During the day, the solar energy is used to heat up the tank, and at night, the tank is used to heat up the house.
But of course the best way to do it is not to use electricity for heating.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by RedBear on Saturday December 10 2016, @08:55PM
Absolutely correct. Fossil fuels are much better since they appear magically in our own backyards and require no transportation or processing whatsoever.
Also, fossil fuels are definitely not subsidized. At all. The world doesn't subsidize fossil fuels to the tune of 5 trillion per year. Nope. Fossil fuels are super cheap.
Boy, that sounds great. I'm sure we'll figure out how to mass produce 100 million barrels of hydrocarbon fuels per year by this time next week. And I'm sure we can all agree to continue pretending that burning hydrocarbons doesn't produce particulate pollution that causes smog, acid rain, and contribute to the early death of hundreds of thousands of people worldwide each year.
Yeah, the best possible way to do things is to strip all the insulation from our homes and use a hundred times as much energy to maintain a constant 70 degrees inside. Cost be damned, pollution be damned, we need to maintain our standard of living and show the rest of the world how awesome we are.
And now back to reality:
- Renewable energy is not somehow magically dirtier than fossil fuels.
- Renewable energy is no longer more expensive than fossil fuels.
- Renewable energy will NOT cause our utility bills to skyrocket.
- We CANNOT continue to use the fossil fuels that are still in the ground without severely damaging our planet's climate for thousands of years.
- "Liberals" are not out to enslave humanity and destroy everyone's quality of life by making energy too expensive to use. They just want a world where all of our descendants can survive and flourish.
- It is ludicrously inefficient to waste renewable energy to create hydrocarbons when we can just directly dump that same energy into vastly more efficient electric propulsion systems.
- Have you even heard of wind energy? It works quite well at night.
- You are spreading unsupportable nonsense.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 11 2016, @01:07PM
And I'm sure we can all agree to continue pretending that burning hydrocarbons doesn't produce particulate pollution that causes smog, acid rain, and contribute to the early death of hundreds of thousands of people worldwide each year.
This is much less of an issue with artificially produced hydrocarbons, than ones refined from oil pumped out of the ground.
I don't think they are a solution to our problems, but don't rule them out for spurious reasons. Artificially produced hydrocarbons may be the best fit for some use cases.