I read the story.
I saw the comments on the story
I laughed at the pedantic slapfights happening in the comments.
I came here to comment on the neat story and poke fun at the silliness, to find the same pedantic slapfights here.
Sigh.
EV never has to be recharged… Because it recharges on the way downhill.
“World’s largest EV never has to be plugged in” is sufficiently click-baity without being so dumbly self contradicting
I think it’s still pretty cool. Turning potential energy to kenetic
More like “never has to stop working to charge”. It is novel that its charging mechanism operates as a function of doing its primary job.
Not novel. I think there was a train somewhere in Africa, that transported some ore from mountain to port. On the way down with ore it charged and uphill it used charge.
Is novel for a dump truck to use this. Of course it’s not a completely new concept entirely.
Amateurs.
The 1963 Černý Důl – Kunčice nad Labem aerial ropeway is over 8 km (5 mi) long, over 30 m high in places and carries 135 tons of limestone every hour from a quarry to the nearest train station. Its 120kW 3-phase synchronous motor requires power for a few minutes at the start and end of each day when most of the 800kg-capacity trolleys are empty, and spends most of the shift generating mains electricity and acting as a speed governor. Unlike the EV, it is fully autonomous most of the way, only 5 people are required to operate it. (Loading, unloading and timed dispatching is automatic, arriving/leaving carts just need to be checked; a safety latch has to be manually dis/engaged on trolleys passing the check.) The quarry will continue operation as long as it pays off, then the ropeway will be scrapped (projected 2033). A dude illegally rode the way up on it somewhat recently. He could have fallen to his death if he pulled the latch.
There’s also one in the UK Tom Scott did a video on.
I know, this one is shorter and has mechanical brakes. Not as great but I imagine the Czech one, one of the largest in Europe, has very few English-language sources that could have pointed it out to him. I don’t know whether the Claughton one cannot be ridden or Tom is just squeamish about safety (see description) but the Černý Důl one definitely can, that’s how they do routine inspections.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there are electrified railway lines doing the same. Regenerate large amounts of energy into the grid while descending loaded; consume a relatively small amount of energy to haul the empty train back uphill.
An early version of the Petřín ropeway in Prague used to contain tanks in both cars. The upper one would be filled with
sewagecollected rainwater from the city’s hilltop quarter and the energy of the descent was used to pull the other car up. Additionally, the way up cost twice as much so there was an incentive to ascend on foot, which was about as fast despite the incline.Neat.
Paywall article, but this already exists in Australia for pretty much the same use case: https://www.railtech.com/rolling-stock/2022/03/04/australian-mining-company-works-on-infinity-train-using-gravity-to-regenerating-batteries/?gdpr=deny
I don’t know about going downhill in general, but there are some that use regenerative braking (regular braking, on flat terrain) so maybe
Most mines are underground so for most this can’t work, but where it does they are sure to use it.
Regular trains don’t run underground. Lots of opencast mines exist .
Basically all mines have an above ground terminal where whatever you mined is unloaded from your underground trains, lifts, haul trucks or whatever else onto storage piles, then loaded onto the actual long distance trains.
If the mine entry is up a mountain, then the trip down from that point will be a net energy producer regardless of anything else.
The dump truck, at 45 tons, ascends the 13-percent grade and takes on 65 tons of ore. With more than double the weight going back down the hill, the beast’s regenerative braking system recaptures more than enough energy to refill the charge the eDumper used going up.
So the energy this truck uses is harnessed via mining and loading… Essentially this energy was stored in the ore via geological processes.
This truck uses continental drift as his fuel.
Or in physics terms, potential energy.
Since everything seems to be going downhill right now, how would I harness that power? You telling me the crystal peddling influencers were right all along? 🤣
I’ve seen a cable lift that worked basically like that. It transferred ore down the mountain, so heavy buckets going down lifted the empty buckets back up.
In other words, OP’s mom.
Boom
I’ve heard of a diesel-electric logging truck that uses this concept as well. Use the batteries going up the mountain empty, charge them again going downhill loaded.
Is that just a gravity battery that just so happens to be a dump truck as well?
Reminds me of this ropeway thing that Tom Scott covered that doesn’t require power input either, for similar reasons:
Niche application but still cool.
We achieved perpetuum mobile
Kinda like the mine in the UK that use a cableway without a motor to bring ore down and empty buckets up
I saw that Tom Scott episode too. I’ll miss him.
So it was designed for this mine I guess?
I’m not sure there’s a lot of mine you’re going down filled up, the images I have in mind are quite the opposite, but that’s a really cool idea!
There actually is some design to stock energy this way, with weights you lift while having excess energy
If you’re thinking of that CGI crane lifting concrete blocks, it’s unfortunately a really bad idea.
Pumped hydro stores energy by lifting weight uphill, instead. Water is basically the cheapest thing you can get per tonne, and is easy to contain and move.
To store useful amounts of energy using gravity, you need pretty large elevation differences and millions of tonnes of mass to move.
Depends on the scale of “going down”. Many mines are in the mountains and the material has to be brought down to lower elevations. The mine entry may be lower than the nearest pass but still a lot higher than the destination of the ore.
Open pit is much more common for this type of equipment and it’s basically a reverse mountain. Still might be enough regenerative braking from just the weight of the truck though.
An open pit at an elevation of 1.5km still means the bottom of the pit could be 1km higher than the place the ore is processed at
This is very fucking cool.
Very cool! It’s a pretty specialized use case, but still awesome to see.
I cannot avoid to be pedantic on this, it is recharged during half the trip… it just does not require plug-like recharging
I hope OpenTTD devs consider adding gravity-based electric transportation of heavy loads as an option
2017
At 50 tons and 700 kilowatt-hours, this truck is the biggest EV in the world Each round trip will generate 10kWh of spare electricity for the grid.
“EDumper” is a great name for a dump truck.
Wow what a great use case.
I’m pretty sure they’ve been doing this for years in South America already.
Reminds of this bucket-line system
Not very smart that they waste all that energy in mechanical brakes. See my comment (the one with the picture) for a way bigger and electricity-generating ropeway, including a video of a guy less squeamish than Tom Scott riding most of the 45-minute way up.
WILL NOT TOLERATE THIS TOM SCOTT SLANDER
He literally has
Filmed safely: https://www.tomscott.com/safe/
in the description. Meanwhile, that fat dude from Vrchlabí jumped into a moving bucket of one that is faster, 2.5x longer, at deadly height, and his only plan of getting down safely was a mattress. He acknowledged how illegal and dangerous it is and yet publishes the video with his full name.
Just accept it, Tom Scott was being way more cautious.
firstly I was joking
secondly, cautious ≠ squeamish. we shouldn’t be setting masculinity as an exampleYeah, sounds like maybe he just didn’t have a death wish.
“World’s largest EV”
Blatantly untrue. Larger EVs have been in use for more than a century at this point in the form of EMU trains.
The emus have trains now?!
It was part of the treaty. That and the Great Dingo Barrier.
Take that Australia!
I’ll pick up the pedantic torch. Trains are made of train cars, I’d argue each one is a separate car or vehicle even though they’re strapped together.
I feel like The ISS ticks a lot of the boxes for a vehicle though, how big is that?
This will conversation evolve into two things: are hotdogs and tacos sammiches, and we becoming crabs.
You just toss it when the battery dies and get a new one.
Perfection is the enemy of the good; climate change is even worse.
Well yes but it does also recharge itself by going downhill while loaded and storing power from regenerative brakes. Then it drops the load and has enough charge to drive back up. The power is coming from it being loaded at the top.
I know how it works. I was making a joke by applying the concept of disposable e-waste junk to a massive dump truck.
Yes but your comment was in every way indistinguishable from a comment by an idiot who had no idea how it worked, didn’t read the article, and commented an incorrect explanation anyways.
You truly believe someone thought that you would just throw away an entire dump truck when the battery died?
Depends on how easy it is to remove the battery and how many replacement batteries are on the market.
Also a bit of a ship of theseus issue where if the truck gets refurbished by the company then is it the same truck?
These things are very large and very few in number. I know nothing about the company behind its production.
So it is possible.
I’m no phycisist but I’d bet that the claim “it consumes no energy” is almost certainly false. I get what they mean but this isn’t exactly a honest way to describe it.
I think it means that the net energy consumption is zero. It can use energy, but it generates enough to offset it.
Strictly speaking, the energy it consumes is the gravitational potential energy of the ore they’re mining, which would be consumed anyway in the form of, well, gravity, acting on the ore on the way down. They’re just using it productively instead of dissipating it as heat from the brakes. Using only energy that ordinarily would have been wasted is of course very neat, but it’s not breaking any laws of physics.
well that was unexpected
I’m curious if the desgin team knew about it in advance
Are you asking if Swiss guys knew about mountains? )
