Minnesota to try and ban gas powered equipment

[turbo36]

All built powered with battery operated tools?

Well, certainly, some of the tools are battery powered, when's the last time you saw a drill with an extension cord? Oh, I'm sorry you were just being cute weren't you?

 

[Hay Dude]

No. The solar farms feed the grid. The factories use power from the grid. There are some huge solar farms going up in Indiana, something I never expected, especially northwest Indiana, with it's permacloud from Lake Michigan.

They must be built. With coal fired going off line and forced EV’s and electric appliances on the horizon, it’s pretty obvious. Demand for electricity is going up because everything is going electric.
I hope you don’t get one right near your house.

 

[Hay Dude]

To put it in perspective for those that won't read the article...

how much of America’s 900 million arable acres are owned by Chinese nationals?

Chinese entities own 0.04 of 1 percent of total U.S. farmland.

Thats like saying North Korea only has a couple nukes.
It’s more important to consider the location they are buying the farmland.
THAT is the main concern.

Kinda correlates with the spy balloon.
I guess some people have a hard time catching on…..

 

[turbo36]

Interesting comments about US farmers, my neighbor and many of my friends around my northern Michigan property are reasonably large farmers, I'm talking about in the range of 5,000 acres or so. Now they may not be a lot of acreage in Iowa but in Michigan it is a lot of acreage. Recently, I had a conversation with one of my buddies and he was going on about how important he was because he created 16 jobs on his 5,000 acres I said that his farm subsidies were cut last year. Of course I had to bite my tongue because I created 80 jobs on 4 acres in my factory and have never gotten a federal subsidy.. When farmers complain sometimes I think they protest too much.

 

[MossRoad]

Well, certainly, some of the tools are battery powered, when's the last time you saw a drill with an extension cord? Oh, I'm sorry you were just being cute weren't you?

On that subject, this is pretty interesting. My mother in-law slung pneumatic tools in the AM General plant for years. She said the hose was often in the way, or you'd lay on it and it was uncomfortable, or you'd trip on the hoses, etc...

https://energyefficiency.ornl.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/A-Case-Study-of-Replacing-Pneumatic-Tools-With-Battery-powered-Ones-At-an-Automobile-Assembly-Plant.pdf

 

[MossRoad]

They must be built. With coal fired going off line and forced EV’s and electric appliances on the horizon, it’s pretty obvious. Demand for electricity is going up because everything is going electric.
I hope you don’t get one right near your house.

They can't build one right near my house because it would blind the pilots.

Indiana is a large coal state still. It's going away, being replaced with natural gas and renewables. I was talking to a guy last week that services generator engines. The company he works for has contracts to service the mining equipment in southern Indiana. They also service a lot of things that are not diesel related. He said they have been diversifying for many years, so that their eggs aren't all in one basket.

 

[turbo36]

They can't build one right near my house because it would blind the pilots.

Indiana is a large coal state still. It's going away, being replaced with natural gas and renewables. I was talking to a guy last week that services generator engines. The company he works for has contracts to service the mining equipment in southern Indiana. They also service a lot of things that are not diesel related. He said they have been diversifying for many years, so that their eggs aren't all in one basket.

Coal powered electric generation cost more now than natural gas. The maintenance cost on coal plants is astronomical compared to demand gas generation plants.

 

[MossRoad]

Interesting comments about US farmers, my neighbor and many of my friends around my northern Michigan property are reasonably large farmers, I'm talking about in the range of 5,000 acres or so. Now they may not be a lot of acreage in Iowa but in Michigan it is a lot of acreage. Recently, I had a conversation with one of my buddies and he was going on about how important he was because he created 16 jobs on his 5,000 acres I said that his farm subsidies were cut last year. Of course I had to bite my tongue because I created 80 jobs on 4 acres in my factory and have never gotten a federal subsidy.. When farmers complain sometimes I think they protest too much.

I've become friends with a guy whose family farms around 10,000 acres, and finishes around 6000 hogs at a time, 3 times a year. He has friends that do chickens, beef, dairy, etc. It's HUGE business.

We were talking a couple weeks ago about hog farming, and recalling that around here, and especially in southern Michigan, it was common to see field after field of the little corrugated hog huts in rural areas. Now it's all CAFO. (confined animal feeding operations).

Long gone are the small producers. That's pretty much how every technology goes. The economics of scale always win.

 

[Hay Dude]

MMMMmmmmmm love me that mass produced watered down corporation milk. Expeshully the walmart stuff.
So wholesome.

 

[MossRoad]

Coal powered electric generation cost more now than natural gas. The maintenance cost on coal plants is astronomical compared to demand gas generation plants.

Someone (they?) has built two NG plants near us in the past couple years. Originally, one of them was going to be a coal gasification plant. That was shouted down by the locals due to pollution concern. They aren't as concerned about the NG plant.

There's what I thought was a large solar farm across the highway from one of the NG plants. Apparently, it's not large. There's plans for a larger one out there now. The farmers are on board with that, because it's a land lease. So they get decades of lease payments, the land stays in the family, and it can go back in to production in the future if solar fails. They can also do some specialty crops within the solar farm. It's an interesting project.