Well, it's kinda related to the topic. I was looking at getting an electric car (and I'd be interested in an electric tractor eventually after they prove themselves if they get there in my lifetime), but only because I'm eventually heading towards building my little solar farm out on my property. My initial problem is when I work, I work 12 hours, and don't get home until after dark, and once I start living out there, that means having a fairly huge battery to charge up my electric car battery (I think they are in the 80 kilowatt-hour range?) overnight so I can drive it to work the next day.
So if I add a tractor to my own little grid there, that's even more battery storage I'd need. I'm planning on doing this off-grid, not grid tied. Currently there's no power on my property, and for the cost of bringing it there, I could build my own small system enough to power my house and some decent battery backup, just not enough to charge up electric car, let alone not enough for a Tractor.
The Distributed Renewables
@Phil Timmons is definitely on ERCOT's radar, it's a topic that comes up every year during our annual training seminar. It is a good thing, but also bad thing. Good because it does lower peak demand a bit, but bad because anything most residents do are un-regulated and don't need to be reported to ERCOT under NERC regulations. Distribution companies kinda make up their own rules, and don't have to report it to ERCOT, ERCOT has a good idea how much distributed renewables there are, but it's just an educated guess. Texas is huge, if the whole state was sunny one day at 80 degrees, and had X MW of load, then the next day the whole state was cloudy and had X MW load at 75 degrees at the same time, they can do the math to kinda figure out the temperature difference and guess how much extra load they have to generate that isn't produced from distributed renewables, but how do you do that when it's cloudy in some parts and sunny in others. But by tracking weather in the populated areas, they can kinda get an idea of this.
The hard part is, say you have the extreme: Let's assume everyone has solar panels on their roof and can produce most of their own power during the day. Then the next day it's cloudy and almost no rooftop solar produced say in all of Dallas....So one day they need another 30,000 MW of generation. But the whole next week it's sunny. This is an extreme, but it's to show that they still need 30,000 MW of generation, just sitting there, not making money (really losing money). This is the same problem really with Grid scale Solar and Wind. When it's not there on a given day, you still need the fossil fuel generation available. So what, you waste billions annually on maintenance/upkeep just to keep power plants available just in the event they are needed a few times a year? Well, Texas certainly wouldn't be enjoying some of the best energy prices in the United States, that's for sure lol. Again, that's an extreme but it's to show there is a tipping point where it becomes a problem with no good solution.
It's a fascinating problem....another issue is ERCOT needs a given inertia for whatever generation it has online. Wind/Solar/Distributed Energy don't have anything spinning (think about purpose of a flywheel, it's exactly same concept in grid and why we need it). Grid scale Wind, for those not familiar, use AC generator that spins at random speeds to produce DC, and then they convert that back into AC (they have to do because of NP=120f) so they can get steady 60 Hz. So the more renewables we have online, the less inertia we have online. I forget the percentage that is critical, I think it's 40% if I recall, but at some point, if a refinery starts a big enough load or some huge plant like that, it could collapse the grid because there isn't enough inertia to keep it going.
The only real solution is to have a bunch of batteries or some other way to store that energy for later, then have something like synchronous condensers that aid in the inertia problem without being a generator, but that's a whole lot of infrastructure to build....and you run into same problem as above, what happens if you have extreme 100 year event like we had recently and it's cloudy for 3 straight days and the batteries all dry up. Are we also going to be paying billions to just keep fossil fuel plants upkeep to be at the ready within say a weeks time?
EDIT: For clarity, just wanted to say it's awesome to talk about this and don't mean to sound condescending in my answers when I state my rhetorical questions just presenting the problem. My personal thoughts coming from the nuclear navy is that it is far safer than people realize and the best solution as a stop gap until better tech like better battery tech is available. Fossil fuels will always be needed as additional backups and ability to ramp up or ramp down (can't ramp down nuclear nearly as easy) but Nuclear is very stable as long as you build it smart (not Chernobyl liquid graphite moderator insides instead of the normal water that is safer) and don't build it where it can get slammed by Tsunami (Fukishima had many other problems they were warned about not up to good standards they ignored) etc. Nuclear Waste I think seems far better to deal with than wasting all our fossil fuels, but I think it's just too scary for most people. I blame Hollywood
Back to this tractor problem by the original poster that I started out with here, even if electric tractors were great today and had been around, tested and improved upon for the last 5 years, I still wouldn't get one, because currently, with my setup, I just wouldn't have the battery capacity overnight to charge them up, and when I have 8 hours off to play around, I'd want something that wouldn't need plugged in while I'm forced to take a break. I work in shifts and have two 7 day off periods each 6 weeks....Currently I'm out on my property often 10 hours a day with just my chainsaw, I want a tractor that can go at least that long so electric just wouldn't work for me. It's easy to say, oh just buy more batteries but I think it would be cost prohibitive, even if I build my own battery packs like I'm planning to do for solar by the way.
Yeah buddy! I'm kinda geeking out about planning my own mini-grid system.
