4 ms·

See also - many mines around the world using enormous electric trucks that never need to be re-charged. They go uphill empty, and re-gen their entire battery on

• jermaustin1 3y ago
  I wonder what they are doing with the excess power. I'm sure it wouldn't be worth it to pump back to the grid, but maybe to off load into mining equipment, especially since the truck would need to start at around 60% battery charge each day to avoid over charging.
  • Arrath 3y ago
    Running other equipment within the mine and lessening the load on the generators, generally.
• presidentender 3y ago
  I am embarrassed to say how little sense that made to me - the mines with which I am passingly familiar are all open-pit copper mines, where the extraction takes place below the processing, and I could not get my head around the idea that this one truck was taking some material down to the mine. Of course the answer is that this mine is at the top of a mountain, and the processing facility is lower. The material the truck hauls is lime and marl.
  • KennyBlanken 3y ago
    It really is breathtaking - in a heartbreaking way - that we have 'developed' to the point as a society where we regularly destroy entire mountains. Removing them is not without consequence - a mountain alters the weather around it. So incredibly foolish.
    • fnord77 3y ago
      wait until you find about about Kardashev Type II civilizations
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
• m3kw9 3y ago
  Seems like a circular problem, how did you get all the cargo at the top of the hill in the first place?
  • bwilliams18 3y ago
    they're extracting the cargo from the earth at the top of the hill.
  • jlhawn 3y ago
    It's a mine. The hill is the cargo.
  • jnsaff2 3y ago
    Mountain forming is how all that cargo got to the top.
• lordfrito 3y ago
  Crazy, basically using the stored potential energy to their advantage. Never occurred to me to use the energy to create electricity. Makes me wonder if you could build a power plant at the bottom of a mountain that slowly levels the mountain to power the local grid. I wonder just how much potential energy could be extracted from a mountain?
  • heattemp99 3y ago
    I've got an idea.. we build a wall at the edge of a huge mountain area. Water collects behind the wall during the winter, and then in the spring and summer we let the water out through a hole in the wall, which spins generators while the water flows out the hole.
    • lordfrito 3y ago
      Interestingly, there's a lot of current work around grid energy storage. Storing excess wind/solar power for use overnight, etc. Everybody assumes batteries (lithium etc.) as the way to go. However the greenest / most efficient way to store the energy is actually just pumping water uphill to a reservoir, and extracting the energy by letting it flow back down. Of course this storage system only works wherever there is someplace "higher" to pump the water. My understanding is that it's not worth the trouble to build a hill/mountain to pump the water up.
      • ElectricalUnion 3y ago
        And when you have the space and the ability to build such pumped-storage hydroelectricity facilities, they require much cheaper and much more environment friendly materials. And most already build hydroelectricity facilities can be retrofitted (although at high cost) to become pumped-storage hydroelectricity facilities.
        • kwhitefoot 3y ago
          > And most already build hydroelectricity facilities can be retrofitted (although at high cost) to become pumped-storage hydroelectricity facilities. Really? You need a huge downstream reservoir to hold the water that you are going to pump to the upstream reservoir.