Grid-scale batteries will enable us to have only renewables right? When the air quality regulations start coming for Ag, will you be ready? Super singles and soil compaction.
Grid-scale batteries will enable us to have only renewables right?
Perhaps, but in addition to this being years off, there's an oft-missed detail: besides the obvious need to have batteries to power houses at night (or when the wind doesn't blow), we will need batteries that function on longer time scales to handle seasonal variations.
First some context. I installed my own solar panels and worked with a company that did the design and supplied the parts. When we were discussing designs, I told the gentleman I wanted a simple grid tie system with no batteries and that I was going to just do net metering with Xcel.
Meaning that we designed the system to have a yearly average of zero excess kilowatt-hours: I cannot cash out any excess solar credits from Xcel and cannot take solar credits when and if I move. So, over the course of a year I have periods where I am generating an excess (usually Spring and early Fall) and periods where I either break even or am consuming an excess (Summer and Winter respectively).
This, along with some recent reading, got me thinking. If I were to run my house entirely on solar and wanted to use batteries, I'd obviously need batteries enough for the day-to-day. You need to store up enough solar during the day to carry you through the night.
But there's more here. I would need battery storage enough to not just keep a surplus to spend on a daily basis, I would also need battery storage enough to keep energy stored up longer term, on the scale of at least months, to carry me through the parts of winter when I am in a deficit.
That is, I'd need batteries enough to collect and hold energy from Spring until Winter.
Let me show you with some consumption and production reports from my own array. Attached are reports I ran which illustrate late Spring/Summer and Winter (labeled "Summer" and "Winter" respectively). In these, and all graphs attached, the tan is energy consumption and the blue is energy production.
Obviously producing a LOT more than I consume, especially in April/May and consuming more than I produce in deepest Winter.
This is even more striking when you look at the screenshot labeled "Winter 22 - 23" since this year's winter has been so dry out here on the Plains. That's an even bigger deficit due to being much colder on average and to having frequent snowcover on the panels.
And these deficits are not daily. They are DAYS long.
The last image (the screenshot labeled "1 yr") covers the entire year in one go in case you'd like to have a zoomed out perspective.
You can generalize from my little energy microcosm to our grid in general. It's colder and the sun is not as high nor out as long during Winter in the Northern Hemisphere.
Batteries are often held out as the answer to the inevitable question about what to do when the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing, but when politicians toss this out there they are leaving out the gigantic amounts of storage needed.
The storage on a day to day basis needed would be staggering, but as in the case of my own house, the amount of seasonal storage would have to come ON TOP of that giant number.**
Why is no one in the mainstream media not looking at these numbers? Why are they not asking simple questions of our politicians such as these? This is not esoterica. This is mundane, everyday common sense.
And the wool is getting pulled over our eyes while we're being asked to invest more and more into making our state run on renewables. We are putting shovelfuls of money into this endeavor, and I fear that what we'll be left with is a need for more shovelfuls before finally someone in the media thinks to ask questions like "well golly Governor X, how many batteries are really needed and how much will that cost?"
**You could also, I suppose, make the argument that we could overwhelm the long-term storage problem with more panels (and you can say this about my home too). That is we could install panels enough to give us at least our daily need in deepest darkest winter. But that is just as much an issue as batteries. Having more panels means more material, more cost, more land or roof space, etc.
When the air quality regulations start coming for Ag, will you be ready? Will you be well versed and an effective advocate?
If you answered no or have any sort of doubt, I would say you should take that as a signal that you need to start educating yourself and start preparing. Now.
I read the CPR article linked first below recently and it got me thinking. Right now in the state of Colorado there is no major air quality regulation that I know of that affects Ag directly. I don't know of a serious effort to put on in either.
Yet.
I say yet because when I think back over my relatively short time in watching air quality regulations, what I've seen is a step-wise marching of regulation (at the behest of legislative policy) into areas previously untouched.
That tells me that when the current efforts to eliminate greenhouse gases prove insufficient for the Democrats running this state, or when they get around to thinking they're safe, they'll turn their attention to Ag.**
"If you wish to receive the monthly agenda or hearing notices as they are published, you may request to be added to the commission's distribution list by sending us your contact information at cdphe.aqcc-comments@state.co.us and include in the subject line: Email Distribution List."
**I also think that they'll turn their attention to how you and others commute sooner or later, but that's another post.
https://www.cpr.org/2024/03/13/measuring-a-major-source-of-methane-gas-with-a-laser-that-detects-cow-burps/
https://agnext.colostate.edu/methane/
https://cdphe.colorado.gov/aqcc-meeting-information-and-commission-calendar
Related:
I was talking with someone recently. He told me he'd spend his whole weekend moving equipment and etc.: his family is in the process of moving and selling their (substantial) holdings out of the state.
I asked why. He told me that this state is becoming more and more hostile to Ag and they're tired of it.
As an example he offered the increased fees on "red" or "dyed" diesel.**
I went looking and sure enough, the state does now have some new fees on red diesel. See the two links below for more context on dyed diesel and the new fees (in that order).
Yet another example of this state making it more expensive to business and driving economic activity elsewhere.
**In case you're not aware, you can buy diesel fuel for vehicles that don't operate on the roads (like Ag equipment). This diesel does not have the usual taxes on it to pay for roads since the vehicles that use it don't go on roads. In order to make it easy to spot potential fraud, the diesel is often dyed (red) so that anyone looking in the tank of an on-road vehicle can spot malfeasance.
https://tax.colorado.gov/fuel-tax/dyed-diesel.
https://tax.colorado.gov/fuel-fee-surcharge
Soil compaction, tires, and farm production.
That time of the week again. Last post of the day and thus it's something for fun. I have some things I want to write about tomorrow (and I just took a few days off) so I will post Saturday and Sunday, but I will still hold to my rule about something interesting not related to politics.
I was at the tire shop the other day and I saw an ad from a company that talked about soil compaction and "super singles" for tractors.
Let me back up a step if you're not familiar. So-called "super singles" are when you take and replace dual tires with single tires either for an on road vehicle (like a semi) or an off road like a tractor. I put a picture of both kinds below for your reference.
Soil compaction is a big thing in farming because, to greatly simplify things, plants like to be in open airy soil. It's easier to put their roots out and roots actually like having oxygen around them (one of the surest ways to either kill or make a plant suffer is to keep its roots in boggy, wet soil all the time--unless they're the kind that like that sort of thing).
And when it comes to farming, the health of your plants and thus the yield, is king. That is one of the major factors that determines the size of your paycheck. In other words (see for example the first link below), soil compaction is tied directly to money.
Super singles vs. duals and even what pressure to inflate tires to, then, is no small matter in farming.
This was the thrust of the advertisement I saw on the wall at the tire shop. That company (see the second link below) contends that their super single Ag tires cause less compaction than duals do. To give you a sense of their arguments, especially when you consider compaction not just directly under the tire, but in an intermediate root zone, I attached the graphic from their website which is the same graphic I saw on their poster. I circled the relevant intermediate zone in blue.**
I'm not a soil scientist, but this seems reasonable to me. I did do some (very) minor research on the topic and found that not only does the size of the tire matter, but it's inflation pressure does too.
In broad strokes, the bigger the contact patch of the tire (things that you can control by having super singles and by slightly deflating your tires when on the dirt) the less compaction. There are some wrinkles here, however. If you deflate too much you burn more fuel and you wear out the sidewall of the tire faster.
If you're interested in more technical detail, I put a link to a more scientific resource on the matter third below. It's not too far beyond the reach of a layperson, but it will be a stretch perhaps.
If you walk away with nothing else from this post, I hope you leave with this. If you thought farming was a simple case of plunking seeds in the ground and then driving back over the field with a combine, I hope you have a little better understanding now of JUST HOW TECHNICAL agriculture has gotten.
As we try to wring more and more production out of a finite supply of ground, expect this to continue.
One last niblet. In case you wondered at the picture at the top of this post, the genesis of crawlers (vehicles on caterpillar tracks) was, if memory serves, farming in the Salinas Valley. Farmers there needed to get their seeds planted in very soft soil in Spring and thus needed giant tires so their heavy steam equipment didn't sink. The picture at the top is from the "nothing new under the sun" files and shows an old version of the steel "super single" that preceded the development of caterpillar tracks to allow tractors to "float" on the soft soil.
Have a good end to the week and see you tomorrow!
**I am not sure of your familiarity with physics, but the diagram for the compaction on the duals struck me as reminiscent of constructive wave interference, the phenomenon where two, say, sound ways add with each other to produce a stronger individual sound wave.
https://news.clemson.edu/clemson-michelin-study-impact-of-tire-pressure-on-soil-compaction-in-south-carolina/
https://www.titan-intl.com/en/gaining-traction-blog/2022/Feb/how-to-reduce-pinch-row-soil-compaction
https://extension.psu.edu/adjust-tire-pressure-to-reduce-soil-compaction#:~:text=By%20using%20the%20proper%20tire,compaction%20and%20improve%20equipment%20performance.&text=Did%20you%20know%20that%20you,pressure%20in%20over%2Dinflated%20tires%3F