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Originally Posted by roKWiz
I'm the least convinced person to be praising EV's but I can not see why the mining industry would be any different to say the building industry trialling this.
New houses (and estates) are built all the time away from grid connection at first, all the local trades either have portable generator power, powering their tools or sun power, charging their battery packs.
On a grand scale......
I can see large sun tracking solar arrays set up to charge the fleets of onsite utes simply driving into a charger parking cradle while they swap between fully charged vehicles and depleted charge vehicles.
Won't happen now but as large companies are given incentives to go EV why wouldn't they.
I mean they are saving money cutting jobs with fully automated equipment this would be just another step beyond that especially as most of them would probably like to claim carbon credits.
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Using EVs underground would be beneficial, until you consider that behind collapse and flooding, the biggest danger underground is fire, and the majority of fires are electrical.
There's also the matter of inertia. We have to provide Utes, often for a single supervisor to drive short distances as very low speed. I've often pontificated that something similar to a golf buggy would be more than adequate.
A majority of LVs are used on dayshift only, so they could charge overnight, but the reality is that they are literally not even a drop in the bucket.
Until such time as battery powered haul-trucks become viable, there's no real point.
Furthermore a lot of mines are powered by diesel power.
I worked on the project to build what was then the largest off-grid solar power installation in Australia...
And it was a complete disaster, talk about your White-Elephants.
I can only assume that our domestic grid is much more tolerant of dirty power? Or that the amounts being fed in are relatively small? Any time we tried to take the solar farm above about 30% output, it tripped the whole grid.
Needless to say they also wasted millions on sea-container battery-packs, that were complete duds. Last I heard they had given up on those.
We ended up having to expand the Diesel powerhouse to cover, and pay a premium for nighttime power.