This heavy equipment operator put seven, 20-ton battery electric wheel loaders and dozers from Chinese equipment brand XCMG to work for combined 17,370 (!) hours last year, and realized an “astonishing” cost savings.
Etrucks New Zealand owner Ross Linton is one of the more interesting voices in the electric commercial vehicle space. As his country’s primary distributor of Chinese-made medium- and heavy-duty electric trucks, chargers, and industrial equipment, he has direct access and real-world insights into a lot of machinery we simply don’t (yet) have access to in North America.
In a recent LinkedIn post, Linton shared performance data from a fleet of seven 20-ton XCMG machines in his company’s rental fleet, and the numbers are eye-opening.
“These seven 20-ton class XCMG Group BEV loaders have run a combined 17,370 hours using a total of 412,000 kWh in New Zealand,” he writes. “That’s 23.7 kWh/h at, say, 30c/kWh, or $7.11 per hour. That is an astonishing energy cost saving over any diesel loader.”
Astonishing is just the beginning
That number, $7.11/hr NZ works out to about $4.13/hr US, might still seem high to Americans thinking in terms of electric cars driving at 60 or 70 mph on a highway, but that’s not the world these machines live in.
For context, a direct competitor to XCMG’s 20-ton loaders, the Caterpillar 966, for example, can burn between 4 and 10 gallons of diesel fuel per hour (depending on who you believe and what kind of work you’re doing). With the price of of red dye diesel averaging $5.60/gal as I type this, that puts fuel costs on the CAT somewhere between $20 and 50/hr, or 5-10x the cost of running your machines on diesel.
It doesn’t stop there. With overnight and off-peak charging, US equipment fleets can cut that $4.13/hr in half.
Remember that when the oil money tries to reinstate the draft.
SOURCE | IMAGES: Etrucks New Zealand, via Ross Linton.
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