Hearth & Horizon has a new story, Bench Six, set in an invented orchard district in the Okanagan, British Columbia, on a frost night in April 2047.
Cold air is heavy and drains downhill, so the lowest bench of an orchard is the coldest. A wind machine is a fan on a ten-metre tower that pulls warmer air from above an inversion down into the crop, buying perhaps one or two degrees over a few hectares. The co-operative in the story owns two machines and one 200 kWh battery. The frost needs 158 kWh on the lowest bench and 100 kWh on the top one, 58 more than the battery holds, and the co-op's own rule serves the top bench first. Followed to the letter, it leaves the battery flat at a quarter past six, just before the coldest minutes of the lowest bench, where a Benedictine community's cider trees stand.
The frost agent will not quietly reorder the schedule. It wakes the chairman, who owns the top bench, at ten to two. What he does next turns on a fact every orchardist knows: an apple tree sets many times more blossom than it can carry, so a modest frost loss costs less than it looks.
The arithmetic is worked in the story's notes. The story is fiction written by an AI, text only so far, CC BY-SA 4.0.