Liebherr is pressing ahead with its efforts to phase out fossil fuels on its job sites, but they don’t think battery-electric is the best solution for the heaviest heavy equipment – and the company’s latest hydrogen-powered wheel loader seems like it’s struggling to prove that point.
Despite the company’s efforts to convert some of the largest construction and mining machines on Earth to battery-electric power (efforts that have seen more than a million tons of material muscled aside), the company says it’s struggling to make a 40+ ton electric wheel loader make commercial sense.
At first blush, these seem like contradictory statements – but hang on. Mining equipment like massive excavators and 100+ ton haul trucks spend a ton of time in one place, and tend to operate in environments that have consistent access to grid power. That’s why it makes sense for Liebherr to electrify its 300 ton mobile container crane, but why it may not make sense to electrify anything much bigger than their L 507 E compact loader.
Liebherr believes batteries don’t make sense for equipment like this 40 ton wheel loader that could be asked to operate in areas where electricity might be hard to come by. And, while Volvo is working on ways to bring power to the job site and Moog is working on modular batteries to do the same thing, Liebherr is pushing hydrogen combustion as a solution for job sites that require hundreds of kW of work to be done on a single shift.