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95 comments on Peak Oil, Peak Food, Peak Risk

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Baz on January 9, 2008 - 5:15am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

So what is it? Electric tractors? Thats as plausible as flying monkeys shooting out of my butt.

Why not? If there are prototypes about then somebody is surely thinking that they will be viable, and as oil becomes more expensive, they will be. 5 dollars says that there will be one on the market sometime in the next five years.

Even if you could put up a "Nanosolar solar thin film array" large enough to power one wimpy field tractor, the goddamn SIZE of the array would be enormous and would occupy a great deal of real estate. Nothing would be productive beneath these arrays, too much shade. The solar array square footage would probably equal the 25% of land the old time farmers set aside for horses.

How about a wind generator then? Take up practically zero of your arable land, plug it into your spare battery pack to recharge, and then hot swap as the battery pack runs out of power. Sell the generator and the tractor as a set with the slogan "never buy fuel again", and I'm sure that somebody would buy them.

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SacredCowTipper on January 9, 2008 - 11:45pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Wind power to ammonia, ammonia to fertilizer and fuel. NH3 bears about 40% of the energy of diesel by volume and it'll work in existing engines with simple modifications any mechanic can be trained to make.

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nh3 on January 10, 2008 - 2:18am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

especially with NH3 made from the stranded yet optimal wind resource areas close to the two polar oceans.

NH3 - dirty fertilizer, clean fuel

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noutram on January 10, 2008 - 6:47am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

I think you are onto something here. In addition a bio-reactor unit could be researched/made that would provide enough fuel for the farm.

It's the time ramp up to mass deployment that may be an issue and the provision of the capital to purchase these investments in a potentially crippled financial system.

But given a fair wind and a smack by the government the basics of human existance can be sustained IMO.

Nick.

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concerned on January 10, 2008 - 3:35pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

There was a post on PeakOil.com where someone had built a solar tractor. Here is the deal you're not going to be ploughing a field with power that hits the PV array direct.

First you charge a rather large battery using your solar array then you plough the field.

I would go one step further and allow the tractor to be plugged in not only to it's local solar panel which was quite small. But what would stop you from parking the tractor near the shed that has solar panels on the roof and getting a fast charge.

From what I saw it's feasable, just not sure if we will be smart enough to scale it up to any degree in time.

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