I've got a mixed old school capital 'E' Engineering and applied math bachground coupled with a lot of exposure to mining, cattle stations, and wheat farms.
For forty odd years I've been involved in or tangential to projects related to exploration, cost cutting, new technology, optimised processing, etc.
> If we could start from scratch we probably would choose your solution
Not my solution, I first saw electric powered heavy earth moving equipment in th early 1970s.
The greatest savings to companies and greatest benefits to the environment (aside from somehow getting people across the globe to consume less) come from making the greatest consumption areas more efficient.
Mining equipment runs 24/7/365 continuosly, idealy every hour of every day of the year at near maximum capacity allowing for maintainance.
It's a sector that consumes extremely large amounts of transport energy, more than agriculture.
It's open to innovations such as "infinity trains" and massive dedicated solar farms to generate direct power in sunlight and generate on site hydrogen derivitives for generating power at night.
Farming equipment works "hard" (heavy earth turning plowing, harvesting) for a few weeks a year. Other farm activities (seeding, spraying) happens at other times in the year and doesn't require quite the same horsepower.
There's scope to split ag activity between heavy high horsepower peak usage and lighter continuous pass work.
Already we see consumer ready (but not yet widespread) Agri-bots for weeding and spraying - solar charged, battery powered, no human on board, vision enabled self driving devices that can run near continuously (half the night on battery charged during day) that can minimise spraying to "just the weeds".
For forty odd years I've been involved in or tangential to projects related to exploration, cost cutting, new technology, optimised processing, etc.
> If we could start from scratch we probably would choose your solution
Not my solution, I first saw electric powered heavy earth moving equipment in th early 1970s.
The greatest savings to companies and greatest benefits to the environment (aside from somehow getting people across the globe to consume less) come from making the greatest consumption areas more efficient.
Mining equipment runs 24/7/365 continuosly, idealy every hour of every day of the year at near maximum capacity allowing for maintainance.
It's a sector that consumes extremely large amounts of transport energy, more than agriculture.
It's open to innovations such as "infinity trains" and massive dedicated solar farms to generate direct power in sunlight and generate on site hydrogen derivitives for generating power at night.
Farming equipment works "hard" (heavy earth turning plowing, harvesting) for a few weeks a year. Other farm activities (seeding, spraying) happens at other times in the year and doesn't require quite the same horsepower.
There's scope to split ag activity between heavy high horsepower peak usage and lighter continuous pass work.
Already we see consumer ready (but not yet widespread) Agri-bots for weeding and spraying - solar charged, battery powered, no human on board, vision enabled self driving devices that can run near continuously (half the night on battery charged during day) that can minimise spraying to "just the weeds".
Here's a big one: https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2023-08-25/crop-spraying-r...
Smaller one from 10 years ago: https://research.qut.edu.au/qcr/Projects/agbot-ii-robotic-si...
There's some quite good ones coming from one of the Scandi country, the model name escapes me for the moment.