No pollution? Good luck replacing heavy diesels with battery packs in your lifetime. I thought you were talking about diesel electric at first, but it sounds like you have no idea how much energy it takes to till a field. It isn't a 3,000 lb. car with little rolling resistance, it's a constant load that requires a lot of tractive effort. You'd need a direct connection to the grid to feed that kind of horsepower, which would be extremely cost prohibitive and cumbersome. There is more energy density in a gallon of diesel than your batteries and just about any other fuel, and it can be made from just about anything that burns, including biomatter. Batteries may work with small cars, but heavy trucks and other machines are unrealistic to power with battery packs, which have their own environmental concerns that should not be ignored. They won't last as long under this kind of load either and would be insanely expensive. Locomotives are diesel electric for one reason. The transmission required to make one start from a stop would be incredibly cumbersome and unreliable in a machine that size, with that much mass behind it. The alternator is actually referred to as the "transmission" of the locomotive. If they could run a mechanical transmission cost effectively, they would do it. It would have less power loss. Milwaukee Road is a good example of electrification on a railroad. It was extremely expensive to put in the infrastructure to do it, and maintenance of that infrastructure would never pay for itself for most operations in a large country like the USA and Canada. Diesel will remain king for high power machines until some ridiculously good battery tech arrives. Been hearing we are just around the corner from it for years. Steam engines will probably make a comeback before that tech gets here.
Just think all that mass of a mess of gears would go away with electric motors with no pollution from the engine
No pollution? Good luck replacing heavy diesels with battery packs in your lifetime. I thought you were talking about diesel electric at first, but it sounds like you have no idea how much energy it takes to till a field. It isn't a 3,000 lb. car with little rolling resistance, it's a constant load that requires a lot of tractive effort. You'd need a direct connection to the grid to feed that kind of horsepower, which would be extremely cost prohibitive and cumbersome. There is more energy density in a gallon of diesel than your batteries and just about any other fuel, and it can be made from just about anything that burns, including biomatter. Batteries may work with small cars, but heavy trucks and other machines are unrealistic to power with battery packs, which have their own environmental concerns that should not be ignored. They won't last as long under this kind of load either and would be insanely expensive.
Locomotives are diesel electric for one reason. The transmission required to make one start from a stop would be incredibly cumbersome and unreliable in a machine that size, with that much mass behind it. The alternator is actually referred to as the "transmission" of the locomotive. If they could run a mechanical transmission cost effectively, they would do it. It would have less power loss. Milwaukee Road is a good example of electrification on a railroad. It was extremely expensive to put in the infrastructure to do it, and maintenance of that infrastructure would never pay for itself for most operations in a large country like the USA and Canada.
Diesel will remain king for high power machines until some ridiculously good battery tech arrives. Been hearing we are just around the corner from it for years. Steam engines will probably make a comeback before that tech gets here.