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[princec]

I do believe our local farm - Frogmary Green Farm, South Petherton - was the first in the UK to go 100% off-grid for the farm itself. They use a biomass gas converter to run heating and generator, and there's a large PV solar array too. I think it's probably the only sustainable future for farming. They'll definitely be running ATVs off of electricity because it'll be likely illegal to sell ICE ones in 15 years (which, tenuously, keeps us almost vaguely on-topic because Polaris AIUI are big producers of ATVs, at least, elsewhere in the world) but I'm not so sure they'll ever manage to run combines or threshers off of battery power, as they use about 1.2 litres of diesel per km (I think that's about... 2mpg?) - can you imagine the size of the batteries required and the charging infrastructure needed to fill them up?

Cas

[Crissa]

40kwh per gallon of diesel, but how efficient is the translation into work?  How many miles does it need to travel?  Can you produce enough biodiesel to fuel it in any case?

This is why pricing it at the carbon level is more efficient.  Then the true cost of the gallons of diesel can be shown... And they can come up with solutions (like PV arrays charging drone-batteries which trundle out to the working combine-train to power it)

-Crissa

[princec]

I think the best bit is that they could in theory reserve a particular % of land for biodiesel crops and run the whole operation from it. Interesting to watch the farm develop over the last decade.

Cas

[Brammofan]

Okay, so this thread has ventured very far from the subject in the title.  Unless it gets back on the subject, I'm going to lock it.