[RE-wrenches] Array direct farm machinery?

Dan Fink danbob88 at gmail.com
Thu Jul 19 20:07:06 PDT 2012


Hi Eric;

Not a crazy idea, but not really simple either. Water pumping, ventilation
and water aeration are ideal loads for PV Direct systems, as there's no
problem if they are not running at full capacity when insolation is low.
Grinding grain, pressing oil, etc....not enough irradiation, and everything
comes to a halt.

You'll have to gauge the difficulty and cost of (possibly) custom MPPT/LCB
controllers for the other equipment (they are cheap and off the shelf for
water pumping) vs. the cost of a simple battery/inverter system, which does
a great job controlling energy to motors and is again off the shelf.


-- 
Dan Fink,
Executive Director;
Otherpower
Buckville Energy Consulting
Buckville Publications LLC
NABCEP / IREC accredited Continuing Education Providers
970.672.4342 (voicemail)


On Thu, Jul 19, 2012 at 4:20 PM, Eric Youngren <ericyoungren at gmail.com>wrote:

> Howdy Wrenches,
>
> We are thinking up new ideas for powering agriculture in the rural
> developing world to propose for the new USAID "Energy Grand Challenge for
> Development" <http://www.poweringag.org>
>
> One idea is to build PV array direct water pumping systems for irrigation
> that could be converted to power productive use farm machinery for grain
> milling, oil pressing or other farm processing jobs after the harvest is
> in.  The idea being that after the harvest they don't need the irrigation
> pumping for a bit and the PV array could be switched over to drive a motor
> to accomplish a mechanical task.  For that matter if it was an easy swap
> (Anderson 2 pole connectors, dual battery boat switches, etc) between the
> pumping load and the machinery load the same PV array could be used on any
> given day to either run the pump or the machine(s).     I'd like to avoid
> batteries altogether and I'd like to allow a single 1 to 3 kW PV array to
> accomplish multiple array direct mechanical tasks.
>
> This is just a brainstorm at this point,  maybe this is a crazy idea and
> not worth pursuing, but I'd be really curious if anybody has any experience
> doing anything like this or any other ideas to bring to the table.
>
> Any ideas?  Thanks!
>
> Eric Youngren
> Solar Nexus International
> www.solarnexusinternational.com
>
>
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