Along with its hydrogen-powered NH2 electric tractor, New Holland has delivered a promise of the “energy independent farm”—a concept that may be reality sooner than you think.
The NH2 is an early wavelet in a tsunami of electric-powered vehicles rolling off drawing boards around the world.
When the tsunami has swept through, the thinking goes, farms will no longer be dependent on long supply lines of fossil fuels.
With that dependency gone, and innovation in electricity generation in full swing, farmers will find themselves in a unique position to generate their own energy requirements.
This concept is at the centre of New Holland’s vision for the “energy independent farm”, in which farmers use wind, solar or biomass technology to generate their own electricity.
Some of that electricity can be used to produce hydrogen gas from water, providing the farm with a ready supply of energy to run hydrogen-powered electric machinery like the NH2.
Even a year or two ago, such a vision would have seemed fanciful.
But with the NH2, New Holland has delivered a real 106 horsepower (80kW) working tractor, based on the T6000.
In the NH2, hydrogen gas fuel cells replace the batteries used in other electric vehicles as the source of electrical energy.
The advantage of using hydrogen is that a fuel cell can be re-gassed up in minutes, rather than the multi-hour charge that today’s batteries need. The only emission from hydrogen power generation is water.
Hydrogen’s disadvantage is that fuel cells are currently large and heavy—a setback in an electric car, where space and weight are at a premium, but much less so in tractors and combines.
In the NH2 fuel cell, hydrogen gas is passed over a catalyst, which extracts electrons from the gas and passes them through a circuit in a process that generates electricity.
The current is then split between two motors: the main tractor powerplant which drives the wheels, and a separate motor for the PTO and auxilary services.
There are no gears involved, even reverse. When the throttle is pulled into reverse mode, the NH2 just flips the poles on the fuel cell terminals.
By 2015, New Holland hopes to have hydrogen tractors commercially available to farmers, supported by infrastructure for the generation and distribution of the hydrogen gas used by the machines.
Simon Vigour, New Holland’s Australian marketing manager, said future pricing is dependent on hydrogen fuel cell developments in the automobile industry, which will drive development of the technology and associated infrastructure.
The only limitation to the power of future hydrogen machinery is how many fuel cells can be stacked onto a machine, Mr Vigour said.
An electric motor delivers full torque from zero revs to its peak spin. Applying the throttle doesn’t change the engine’s capability to produce power; it just makes heavier demands of the fuel cell.
“In the future we can see this technology going right up to combine level, in the 500-600 horsepower range,” Mr Vigour said.
“This is where we believe we need to go. It’s not going to change overnight, but in a relatively short space of time we’re going to see a big change in the fuels we use to farm.
“All the technology we need is already there.”
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