Solar Storm Knocks Out Farmers' Tractor GPS Systems During Peak Planting Season
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And this storm was significantly lower in intensity than the Carrington event.
Why would you conclude that, because a far weaker storm than one that has occurred in modern history didn't destroy civilization, that the fear of a far stronger storm is overblown? We don't have to guess what the damage would be from that sort of storm - we know why it caused the damage we did, and we can understand the damage it would do to modern infrastructure if not protected against.
If we continue to harden the grid against these storms, we might well be able to survive a Carrington (or stronger) level storm, but it will be because we took the proper precautions because we understand how big the risk is.
The interesting thing about these mass extinction events is twofold. The first is that they are (1) extremely improbable and (2) will continue to repeatedly happen. And they will never suddenly become more probable. The day before the Ordovician mass extinction kicked off would have very likely been just like any other normal day, even with modern tech. Somebody always wins the lottery sooner or later. The same would also be true even if only one ticket was sold a day. And tickets for the latest drawing have been on sell for about 65 million years.
Wikipedia currently characterizes it as more of a trailing hypothesis:
A minority hypothesis to explain the first burst has been proposed by Philip Ball,[100] Adrian Lewis Melott, and Brian C. Thomas ... Although the gamma-ray burst hypothesis is consistent with some patterns at the onset of extinction, there is no unambiguous evidence that such a nearby gamma-ray burst ever happened.
As a society, we are responsible for not only our society, but we also set the stage for the entire future of the human race. Though an improbable event probably won’t happen tomorrow, we can say with a certain amount of assurance that it will happen in the future.
Therefore we can and should prepare for these events.
Why are local base stations affected? Do they consistently need satellite gps data? If the satellites go missing for a few days, would that mean local base stations won’t work? I have worked with rtk before, but i never understood why not setup your own personal base station network.
1) AGPS is not local positioning. It is a "speed-up" assist from cellular networks to provide the Almanac (e.g., satellite orbit info) quicker than a GPS receiver can get it from the satellites. All AGPS receivers use the actual GPS satellite signals to calculate the receiver's position. No sats, no position.
2) RTK does not provide a local positioning system. RTK allows a base station receiver, which is in a stable/not-moving site, to observe GPS position calculations over a long period of time and 'averages' the positions to arrive at a highly precise position for itself. It then monitors the real-time positions it calculates and broadcasts a list of error corrections to be applied to the satellite signals to reduce the real-time error, which is constantly changing. Again, no sats, no pos.
1. Where does the kinematics in the name come from? The base station is stationary, and kinematics is about the movement of objects.
2. How does the correction signals work? Is it as simple as "now the position is 3.56 m to the left of the true position, correct your position accordingly", or is it more advanced with detailed timing corrections for each satellite's signal or similar?
The RTK position is then combined with the measured error (measured near that location), because GPS is precise but not accurate enough on it's own. Without correction a stationary point slowly drifts around a bit (accuracy: roughly 0.1-1 meters). The correction is called differential gps, and you can provide it yourself with a base station, or use a service that does just gives it to you (from their network of error measuring base stations), see NTRIP. The accuracy with correction can be greater than 0.01m
Both systems need to be receiving GNSS data all the time.
As for planting manually - if the GNSS networks were down permanently or for weeks, then yes steering manually is still possible. If you can wait a day or two and get highly accurate planting and mapping, then why not.
You can, and that used to be common. Some years ago most farmers sold their personal base stations to the local dealer because by doing that the dealer gave their far fields access to a different RTK base station, while before the signals from their personal base station didn't reach the distance fields at all. Plus the dealer maintains the base stations - they are best placed where they are likely to be hit by lightening so someone else taking that risk is overall worth it.
Going from Landroid (wired, fails frequently) to Husqvarna Automower (wired, fairly reliable) to now a GPS RTK solution is quite the leap in technology.
Husqvarna does have an RTK unit but it is quite pricey ($6K). The Navimow is surprisingly inexpensive ($999 for entry level unit). The Mammotion Luba 2 is sort of in-between.
The RTK units are only becoming widely available in the last year or so.
I just so happened to set it up on solar flare day so it's hard for me to say how much that impacted it. It does seem to have a much more consistent signal today, though.
It's quite something to see it precisely drive from one end of the garden to the other, especially after years of managing wires.
I would say the RTK is quite good and accessible at this point. It does require placing the base unit in a place with both a good view of as much sky as possible, as well as being able to communicate on 900mhz to the bot. The bot itself receives GPS signals as well as the 900mhz. The tower and the bot have to see ~5+ of the same satellites at the same time. This is why it's key for the base station to have a good sky view --the bot will constantly be seeing a different subset of satellites, so you want the base station to see "all of them" if possible.
My dream outdoor bot would use a combo of RTK, lidar, vision, as well as WiFi positioning techniques.
I wonder how accurate that could get?
Maybe overkill (RTK alone seems "good enough," but there's still a gap between precision of these outdoor bots and, say, lidar-based indoor vacuum robots.
Oh yeah, the dream bot would also use photogrammetry plus all the other data to reconstruct a full detailed mesh of the outside.
I want a push mower because the available robomowers all have tiny razor blades instead of a actual mower blade and a limited range. My lawn isn’t gigantic but it’s not perfectly smooth or even and I dread paying that price for something that either won’t work or frequently breaks the blades.
As far as lidar and wifi positioning - that could give you sub-cm, but I would go away from positioning to create a mower that knows the difference between a road and a lawn, a flower and a weed, and your lawn and your neighbors. A dream would be just giving the mower the same ‘mow the lawn’ command you would give a teenager and it just working. With the way things are now, these mowers have to be driven around the perimeter and no-go zones created manually. I saw one guy whose lawn was more of a field plotting out the entire mowing track in software with his automated push mower. It’s better in the software then going out to the field to drive it like an RC car, but it’s still far from some5ing like ‘full self mowing’
I was concerned about this as well when I deployed the first robot.
After having a bunch of stumps removed from my yard, all my wires were messed up. So I actually switched to a big zero turn mower for about a year.
You know what I found? The cut quality was worse, even with a sharp blade and perfectly leveled deck.
The powerful traditional rotary mowers kick up a ton of dust, the wheels are much higher impact on the grass, and being a manual process it isn't practical to do every day or multiple times a week.
We realized that we actually liked the "robot grass" much better, so at that point I fixed the wires and now the yard is better than ever.
The reason the robot grass is much better is because it can cut much more frequently. I have them going daily in the AM and the yard is perpetually freshly mowed like a golf course. I just string trim about every other week.
I'm not worried at all about the little blades (and we have a fairly rough yard being in a clearing on a mostly wooded lot on a hill).
They recommend replacing them every month, but I get good results only changing them once a year.
It has self-reproduced twice.
It is a small to medium sized Welsh mountain pony, keeper of grounds here at our farm.
That said I think the whole job could be done with one single RTK mower that is rated for a bigger space, but that wasn't availa available at the time and I've been evolving the setup over the years.
Also there’s VRS RTK without a base station (but you need internet and a subscription) for some reasons. Works just as well. It’s basically turn key.
If there were a national/international massacre of transformers (also, mostly FUD*) there would be an almost overnight response of making dead-simple, dead-easily made transformers and grids would begin being resupplied within weeks. Remember, we could mass manufacture transformers over a 100 years ago.
Of course such a long outage may well be a civilizational disaster, but it wouldn't be years of lead time for replacement.
* Transmission providers have begun monitoring transformers for DC flows on the neutral conductor, which is what damages them in a GMD condition. Once detected, they can drop affected transformers (causing an outage), and even dispatch line workers to physically disconnect if need be.
I'm all for MacGyver-ing solutions quickly, but thus seems like an incredibly bad plan
As to the other objections, do we really think that manufacturing and transport would not be given top priority? The US military is the largest, most capable logistics operation on the planet. They specialize in black-start operations. They can make sure manufacturers get materials, and products get delivered.
In any case the idea of a transformer massacre by GMD is a fading one because the cost-effective way to address the issue, by monitoring and mitigating the effects, are under way and improving over time.
And sure, THEORETICALLY, we could install mitigating tech to instantly disconnect each transformer the millisecond induced over-currents are detected. But in REALITY power companies are insanely tech-backwards. Even today, in a major developed area like around Boston, the technology for DETECTING outages is [wait for customers to call in] and [drive a crew out to look for a break]. Last month, there was a storm that caused widespread outages in much of Maine and NH. Crews were in for over a week, brought in from over a 1000-mile radius; I personally was up there and saw convoys of crews from Tennessee, Pennsylvania, Canada, etc.. It took over a week to restore power in just that region, with zero shortage of supplies. They rely on mutual-aid cross-covering regions to get things working again. In a global-scale event, EVERYWHERE is down at once, and the crews are each on their own.
I had to call in repeatedly about a serious undervolt situation (99V-103V) that persisted for hours and was damaging equipment, and they had no clue about it. They are not even installing technology to detect outages; they sure as hell aren't spending money to mitigate them.
Now, seriously consider a Carrington+ event or EMP attack. The reasonable assumption, even with the mitigation tech you promote, is that almost nothing works. Perhaps a few zones got disconnected in time, but no grid.
This means the entire population will have to survive on the available stock of just-in-time fuel, food, and other supplies.
Most vehicles will not work. Only pre-1980s vehicles and vehicles stored well underground or in basically Faraday cages will work. Charging systems won't work. Fuel pumping stations won't work. So, we've got manual pumping for single-digit percentages of working vehicles, which need to deliver remaining food stocks, and all the equipment for your manufacturing effort.
Most telecomms do not work.
What's in most people's refrigerators will last a few days. Skip a few meals and civil disorder starts. There are at most a few weeks before serious starvation and civil unrest starts.
Now, under these conditions, you propose to gather enough people to:
1) design these new models of transformers that are easy-to-construct-but-still-work-in-modern-systems,
2) determine the logistics of finding factories that can work, getting those factories working, and sourcing material,
3) moving that material to those factories
4) obtaining, moving, watering, and feeding the people to man the factories,
5) actually building the transformers,
6) distributing the transformers to where they are needed.
7) FINALLY, we can get to work rebuilding and cold-starting the grid
There is no way even in a Polyanna++ optimistic scenario that this will work within three-six weeks.
By the time even some of the first 3-5 steps are completed, much of the population will have passed the starvation window of a few weeks, and that is assuming no ad-hoc local wars, and that it wasn't an EMP attack as the start of a war.
In contrast, spending only about $500 million on a reserve inventory of transformers, pre-cashed in appropriate locations, we can jump directly to step 6 or seven on day-2.
Even under the pre-stocked transformers scenario, it's unlikely that everything could be restarted in time to prevent serious follow-on societal-scale damage.
Plus, since each transformer would need to be disconnected (it's the length of attached lines that generate the damaging current), will the cost of building and installing mitigation devices on every transformer, and a system to operate them, actually be cheaper than building spares? It actually seems like and warehousing building spares is likely a cheaper option.
A GMD is a long-duration event that creates movement in the Earth's magnetic field, which induces low-frequency ground currents (literally: current flows in the earth) in the surface of Earth.
An EMP is a very short duration, high-frequency pulse of energy in a local or regional electric field. The effects are completely different, the objects that are affected are completely different, they are completely different cases to consider.
Your anecdote also conflates wind storm damage, which affects local distribution systems, with (hypothetical) GMD damage, which affects long-distance transmission systems. With wind lines, poles, and the occasional transformer, is damaged and there is a lot of labor-intensive repair. With GMD, a very small number of high-capacity transformers are potentially affected. Different deal completely.
So talking about cars that don't start, etc is just nonsense when talking about GMDs.
I don't see any way to continue this dialogue given that we aren't even talking about the same thing.
Even if we have a mild-Carrington event that directly takes out "only" the tens of thousands of transmission-level transformers, there are still orders of magnitude more distribution-level transformers, and even though many of those are likely to be damaged by the disregulated power system as it goes down, let's assume those are OK.
So, we've "only" got to replace hundreds of high-voltage transformers in every metro area, and then reboot the grid. And there are no spares.
But, although cars and trucks are mostly undamaged, there is no power to pump fuel, and there is no power for refrigeration.
So, we still have to perform all of the 7 steps above (plus a BIG one I forgot 5A: Test all the new transformers).
And we still have to do it under conditions where the entire economy is based on just-in-time delivery and stocks of food are rapidly being eaten down, and rotting in unpowered refrigerators, and the entire fuel distribution network is unpowered.
What is your actual plan to design, build, test, and install these thousands of high-voltage transmission-level transformers, and do it before the society rips itself apart from lack of basic supplies?
Saying "oh we could just use old lower-tech solutions adapted for a high-tech grid. is extremely hand-wavy.
And, how is it actually even more cost-effective to design, build, install, and maintain equipment to automatically protect the transformers, when the power grid operators are so backwards half a century after automated monitoring was available but they still refuse to install it?
I'd seriously like to see a good answer, because nothing I've seen from any official or your proposals even remotely seems to solve the problem. What real technology would actually apply? What military op would scale to the entire nation's needs, that wouldn't already be allocated elsewhere?
Without transformers you have no electrical distribution, which would lead to societal collapse very quickly, as there are not enough spare transformers to replace all of the existing ones. We are heavily reliant on refrigerated supply chains for food distribution.
Without electricity, all of the other utilities you rely on would cease. Water, natural gas, internet, sewer, etc all require electricity.
This is called "black start", and it's something all grid operators plan for and regularly test.
How it works is very simple: some power plants are able to start up without the grid (they have their own emergency diesel generators, which in turn have batteries for their own start up), and these power plants can run for a while without any external load. Then it's a careful dance of powering up some high voltage circuits and substations, putting some load on them, powering up more power plants and circuits and substations, putting more load on them, and so on, until all the loads and most of the power plants are connected.
It's not a fast process, but it's also not that slow; from those I've read about or experienced, it tends to take less than a day for most of the grid to be back online (and the places which don't come back online are usually due to some local defect).
> [...] you’d need to disconnect them all at once (coordinating that between independent operators, and as I understand it isolating these giant grid-scale transformers isn’t just a question of flipping a switch). Then you need to ramp down power production in a balanced way as you ramp down places for it to go [...]
It's the opposite. Powering down can be very fast, by design: whenever there's a fault, or parameters like voltage or frequency or power go too far out of nominal, protective devices react by disconnecting whatever they're protecting, so everything on the power grid has to be designed to tolerate being instantly cut off. The worst that happens is that, without anywhere for the power to go, the protective devices on the generators quickly power them down too, and some kinds of generators are very slow to power back up (it can take a whole day for some thermal power plants).
Tolerate is often key. It can still be better to do gradual shutdown even if you can do the instant one.
Why isn't there an emergency plan and scheduled failure testing in place? Netflix randomly power cycles entire datacenters to verify their coordination and fail over plans work. Why does my Parks&Rec stream have better disaster planning than critical infrastructure?
Sounds accurate.
Fascinating to see the effects propagate across different mediums. (unsure how I ended up on farmer TikTok - probably my interest in "big machines")
When I bought my lawn tractor(mower), I made sure not to buy John Deere.
Which is a bug, because either they had fewer satellites to lock onto, or they had conflicting data from them. GPS accuracy issues are solved in trillions of devices around the world.
This is the same company that has evil vendor lock ins, they're just a malign entity.
Very likely. Normally we can assume that if the base station is not where we think it is the base station didn't move and so therefore that is how far off the current GPS signals are and so we can tell the tractor to correct by the same amount. However if the tractor and base station are receiving different answers we have no way to detect that.
> GPS accuracy issues are solved in trillions of devices around the world.
They are IGNORED in trillions of devices around the world, not solved. Normal GPS is at best to within a few meters. Most of the time that is good enough - if you are within 10 meters of where you want to be most people can look up and see the door and get there. (the blind would have trouble). If you are trying to guide something to within 2 cm GPS is only solved if you can make some assumptions that normally hold by didn't. This isn't a bug - at least not until someone can explain how we can fix it.
I work for John Deere, but do not speak for the company. I do not work in the GPS area, I've talked to a few of those engineers but I don't have any more knowledge that is public.
It is indeed a bug, for John Deere has sold millions of farmers gear dependent upon cm positioning, each farmer spending enormous amounts pf capital for this gear, made enormous promises predicated upon this, and so clearly it isn't impossible.
Right?
(your best option here is to not answer, I assure you)
https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B0B8Q3F29S
the other space episodes are also well done
>These automated systems have become critical to modern farming (often called “precision agriculture”), with farmers using increasingly automated tractors to plant crops in perfectly straight lines with uniform spacing. Precision agriculture has greatly increased the yield of farms
I guess this is why, but is the increased yield really worth all the issues I hear about these tractors ?
Techniques such as min-till and no-till aim to minimise soil disturbance (to reduce emissions from deep ploughing and improve soil fertility), but to achieve this you really need to make sure the equipment accurately follows the same path through a field every time, so that the area affected by compaction is mimimised.
Not a farmer, I learned this from the youtube channel Harry's Farm.
It’s more about efficiency than yield
It probably is. If you can increase yield by a few percent that could be the difference between a profitable crop or not. Corn is a commodity, and the market is absolutely cuthroat. That's why farming has changed from something a family could do to something that requires a huge amount of land and expensive equipment to realize the economies that are required to do it profitably.
Older systems follow lines in the field but newer ones also turn at the ends. It allows less skilled operators to do critical operations in the field.
Not at the tolerances they're able to drive those hulking beasts under automation, they can't.
Even in the combine case, if there is bad storm damage they won't drive by hand as the GPS can find the rows and thus harvest a lot more crop. Every couple years there will be a field storm damaged bad enough that it would be a total loss if they had to drive the combine by hand, but the GPS can find the rows and so there isn't even an insurance claim (crop insurance insures you will get your average yields over the previous 10 year, so if you have a total loss crop that brings your average yields way down for the next 10 years which means a future disaster crop gets bad payout)
The same happens with cloud computing. Now companies that used to have to pay for physical servers so rationed their use can have huge amounts of compute just sitting idle (not obviously idle because there’s so much steady state computing for logs, EDR, monitoring etc) which then causes the cloud providers to trash more land and consume more energy and water for their data centers.