Some one wanted to know if we'd buy an EV tractor

[Gator6x4]

Running anything except for a small compact tractor for a short period of time from a battery will be completely impractical due to the weight and cost of the battery, the amount of current you will draw to feed the charger to recharge the battery in a reasonable time period, and the huge demands this will put on the utility distribution and generation infrastructure. A day of cutting hay with a typical disc mower-conditioner or baling with a decent sized round baler (requiring ~100 HP) will require at least a megawatt-hour of battery, which is about 10 times the size of a large battery-powered car battery and would need the equivalent of roughly a thousand amps of 240 volt single phase to charge that battery overnight so you can work again tomorrow. It will take about the same amount of electricity to charge that battery just once as an average house uses in an entire month as well. And that is only a 100 HP tractor, which is pretty small as far as ag tractors go, and only one of them being run at a time. The guy across the highway from me who farms for a living and has about 10 tractors, some of which are 300+ HP center-articulated units, a couple combines, semis, a swather, sprayer, etc. would take several dozen MWH per day during fieldwork and would take roughly the entire output of the nearest substation (about 5 MW) just to power his chargers. And then those megawatt-hours of electricity have to come from somewhere. The utility here has so far kept the lights on but we've already gotten e-mails to reduce usage on certain days in order to try to prevent rolling blackouts. There is no way you can add that enormous demand to the already insufficient system, absolutely no way at all.

Or we use electric power for cars, golf carts, etc and diesel engines in farm tractors. The goal being to reduce the carbon footprint each of us are making which is reducing the longevity of the rock we all live on.

Our forefathers when confronted with a problem collectively rose to the challenge and devised solutions and moved on. This is what made America Great. The biggest problem facing the US today as a nation is we have lost the majority in the “We” and the “I’s” are now leading the charge.

 

[daiseysage]

Running anything except for a small compact tractor for a short period of time from a battery will be completely impractical due to the weight and cost of the battery, the amount of current you will draw to feed the charger to recharge the battery in a reasonable time period, and the huge demands this will put on the utility distribution and generation infrastructure. A day of cutting hay with a typical disc mower-conditioner or baling with a decent sized round baler (requiring ~100 HP) will require at least a megawatt-hour of battery, which is about 10 times the size of a large battery-powered car battery and would need the equivalent of roughly a thousand amps of 240 volt single phase to charge that battery overnight so you can work again tomorrow. It will take about the same amount of electricity to charge that battery just once as an average house uses in an entire month as well. And that is only a 100 HP tractor, which is pretty small as far as ag tractors go, and only one of them being run at a time. The guy across the highway from me who farms for a living and has about 10 tractors, some of which are 300+ HP center-articulated units, a couple combines, semis, a swather, sprayer, etc. would take several dozen MWH per day during fieldwork and would take roughly the entire output of the nearest substation (about 5 MW) just to power his chargers. And then those megawatt-hours of electricity have to come from somewhere. The utility here has so far kept the lights on but we've already gotten e-mails to reduce usage on certain days in order to try to prevent rolling blackouts. There is no way you can add that enormous demand to the already insufficient system, absolutely no way at all.

But the greenies don't care or think about things like that, its electric so all is good.

 

[mo1]

Or we use electric power for cars, golf carts, etc and diesel engines in farm tractors. The goal being to reduce the carbon footprint each of us are making which is reducing the longevity of the rock we all live on.

Our forefathers when confronted with a problem collectively rose to the challenge and devised solutions and moved on. This is what made America Great. The biggest problem facing the US today as a nation is we have lost the majority in the “We” and the “I’s” are now leading the charge.

Golf carts are a usage scenario where battery power makes quite a bit of sense and as a result the majority of the market chose to spontaneously adopt battery-powered golf carts without being forced to do so. The market spontaneously moves from one technology to another when the second one gives a better cost-benefit ratio or allows them to do something they couldn't before that either directly or indirectly increases revenues. Each participant will (only) do so if and when the benefits outweigh the costs for their particular situation. What we are discussing here is that people are being forced to adopt a certain technology completely regardless if it gives an improvement in cost-benefit ratio or even is workable at all for their situation. The situation is that the small number of "I"s that are doing the forcing of battery-powered equipment regardless of its cost and practicality are ignoring the "we"s that are in a situation where the forced adoption of that equipment will be very detrimental.

The quantity of electricity required to charge all of the batteries if forced adoption of battery-powered equipment would require increasing our already-insufficient generation capacity by several times. The only non-hydrocarbon energy source that could produce that much electricity in a remotely reliable fashion is nuclear. Hydroelectric is reliable but the supply of adequate waterways to dam up is nowhere near sufficient and dams have some fairly significant ecological issues as well. Some niche things such as geothermal can be reliable but few places are suitable for them as well. Any intermittent source such as windmills and solar panels cannot be relied upon for producing power on a regular basis unless connected to battery storage that would need to be quite a bit larger than the capacity of the vehicle and batteries to be charged to compensate for system losses. Barring some massive technological development in batteries, we would have long since run out of the uncommon raw materials to make batteries with current technologies before we would even get close to that point. Nuclear is currently a non-starter due to the massive facility and regulatory costs in building new plants, so we are simply replacing gasoline and diesel fuel-powered engines with natural gas-fired power plants and introducing new inefficiencies in the transmission and distribution of electricity, and charging of batteries, and the inefficiencies of the motors in vehicles/equipment that we did not have when the fuel was directly burned in the vehicle and equipment engines, and the "carbon footprint" if anything grows rather than shrinks.

1/3 of tractors sold are less than 40 hp: Agricultural Tractors Market Analysis, Size, Share | Industry Growth (2022 - 27) (I paste the wrong URL before)
View attachment 755335

I would guess that most of these smaller tractors are run for only a coupe hours at a time and not at WOT. I know I may have days where I mow for 4 hours, but mostly I move a bale or two and park it. There is plenty of time to recharge even on a 15 A circuit.

It's not all or nothing. For possibly most of us, the benefits of reduced maintainance and increased reliability will outweight the shorter run time.

The key to this chart is "global." Quite a bit of agriculture in Europe, Africa, and Asia is on what we would consider to be very small farms in the U.S. A 75 HP tractor is a main production ag tractor in those areas as opposed to a smaller utility machine for odd jobs as it is here in the U.S. Some of those areas aren't exactly what we consider to be extremely wealthy but labor is relatively cheap, so buying a less-expensive smaller machine and running it more hours makes perfect sense. They don't just use a tractor for a few hours at most and then park it.

 

[Gator6x4]

Golf carts are a usage scenario where battery power makes quite a bit of sense and as a result the majority of the market chose to spontaneously adopt battery-powered golf carts without being forced to do so. The market spontaneously moves from one technology to another when the second one gives a better cost-benefit ratio or allows them to do something they couldn't before that either directly or indirectly increases revenues. Each participant will (only) do so if and when the benefits outweigh the costs for their particular situation. What we are discussing here is that people are being forced to adopt a certain technology completely regardless if it gives an improvement in cost-benefit ratio or even is workable at all for their situation. The situation is that the small number of "I"s that are doing the forcing of battery-powered equipment regardless of its cost and practicality are ignoring the "we"s that are in a situation where the forced adoption of that equipment will be very detrimental.

The quantity of electricity required to charge all of the batteries if forced adoption of battery-powered equipment would require increasing our already-insufficient generation capacity by several times. The only non-hydrocarbon energy source that could produce that much electricity in a remotely reliable fashion is nuclear. Hydroelectric is reliable but the supply of adequate waterways to dam up is nowhere near sufficient and dams have some fairly significant ecological issues as well. Some niche things such as geothermal can be reliable but few places are suitable for them as well. Any intermittent source such as windmills and solar panels cannot be relied upon for producing power on a regular basis unless connected to battery storage that would need to be quite a bit larger than the capacity of the vehicle and batteries to be charged to compensate for system losses. Barring some massive technological development in batteries, we would have long since run out of the uncommon raw materials to make batteries with current technologies before we would even get close to that point. Nuclear is currently a non-starter due to the massive facility and regulatory costs in building new plants, so we are simply replacing gasoline and diesel fuel-powered engines with natural gas-fired power plants and introducing new inefficiencies in the transmission and distribution of electricity, and charging of batteries, and the inefficiencies of the motors in vehicles/equipment that we did not have when the fuel was directly burned in the vehicle and equipment engines, and the "carbon footprint" if anything grows rather than shrinks.



The key to this chart is "global." Quite a bit of agriculture in Europe, Africa, and Asia is on what we would consider to be very small farms in the U.S. A 75 HP tractor is a main production ag tractor in those areas as opposed to a smaller utility machine for odd jobs as it is here in the U.S. Some of those areas aren't exactly what we consider to be extremely wealthy but labor is relatively cheap, so buying a less-expensive smaller machine and running it more hours makes perfect sense. They don't just use a tractor for a few hours at most and then park it.

I do not know of any law or rule requiring anyone to buy a electric anything.

Innovation, research and foresight by our forefathers is what made America the leader of the other nations. We are spending to much time resisting change because a great grandfather did not do that.

We must come to the cold hard realization that we cannot continue to pollute the air that we also have to breathe. Or having a belief that the stratospheric ozone layer of the Earth is not needed when the fact is it is the Earth sunscreen”.

Without this sunscreen the biblical prophecy of the Earth will be destroyed by fire will come sooner than 4.5 billion years as predicted by scientists.

Look at computer chips. They were invented in the US. 66 percent are now made in Taiwan.

Fresh water is becoming hard to find. We have to have water to live. Either we change our toilet paper mentality (use one time and flush) and start studying and seeking technologiCal advances to reduce our dependence on the things that is causing us trouble or we will destroy the rock we live on.

For example in England less than 5 percent of the homes have central air conditioning. The current heat wave in Europe is impacting severely on the residents.

 

[Alan W.]

The west is running out of electric generating capacity and water. Guess where the greenies will come looking for it when theirs is no longer sufficient.
Heard of an idea on the news the other day that someone is floating. They want to run a raw water line from the Mississippi river west. Guess they want it to dry up before it hits the ocean like the Colorado river

Im not a naysayer, who knows what advances in technology will bring, but it isnt here now for widespread implementation.

 

[Raul-02]

I"m all for alternative energy especially when there's fireshow.
Shoulda had balloons though

Wind turbine catches fire after lightning strike

Footage of a wind turbine in Crowell, Texas shows the aftermath of a lightning strike.

www.bbc.com

 

[Oaktree]

I see too many problems for this to work, at least for now.

Are the batteries proprietary or universal? I hate to have to pay a dealer for a new battery. Or find out that my brand tractor requires that brand's batteries.

Will the batteries cost $15K+? Like some of the horror stories coming from folks that bought used EVs only to find the battery was at end of life and unavailable.

If you run out of juice in the middle of a field how do you recharge or get the tractor home? Portable 50A generator? Really long cable?

Planning for a job do you know which attachments are going to suck your power down the quickest?

If you stall an attachment will it pop a breaker, blow a fuse or burn something up? Breakers get weak if "exercised" too often, and if you don't have a fuse on hand...

I can't imagine an electric motor being any smaller than my diesel (unless they go for one at each wheel) and the battery certainly must be larger than my fuel tank, so what does that do to the size of the tractor?

I store my tractor in a shipping container, now I'd have to get power run out there for charging.

I'm sure there are plenty of things I haven't considered that will only crop up once someone owns an EV tractor.

All valid points, and E-tractors like EVs in general aren't the best option for every use. Probably make more sense in the 30-and-under HP market segment.

But the greenies don't care or think about things like that, its electric so all is good.

What an inane comment. Are you saying that "we've always done it this way" is the best way to do everything? Yes a lot of the "greenies'" ideas probably work better on paper than in the real world, but they have valid concerns too. I'm sure there were many who were dead set against tractors when they first came on the scene too, claiming that if a horse was good enough for them it was good enough for everybody else too.

 

[Oaktree]

Oh that's easy. My local electrical building inspector explained it to me once. He commmented on how he'd have failed me if the electrician hadn't left little loops in the wire as it passed through the 2*4s . I foolishly thought it was so, if years from now, someone needed a few more inches of wire it'd be there. But nope he explained it to me. If the turn is too tight the electrons go whizzing off into space.
And there you have the whole voltage drop mystery.

Surprised he didn't insist you have those little plastic outlet covers to prevent stray electricity from leaking out of the socket.

 

[Fixastuff]

From the years vs hours I see MANY users of this site post I'd say most people on here would do fine with a electric tractor...

I love the ones "200hrs and no problems its a good machine", well I hope not it isn't even broken in yet. Lol.

I think it will be a very long time or never before true farming tractors are electric but most people who tinker on there properties with a conpact one would do just fine being electric.

 

[Raul-02]

ya know it's all made up but it's funny