This is very fucking cool.
Stupid title. It recharges every trip.
It is very obvious they meant it draws no power from the grid. And it doesn’t, indeed, acting fully autonomously.
I don’t really care what they meant. They’re being deliberately ambiguous for clicks.
But it does recharge. And does need to be recharged.
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.
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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.
Kinda like the mine in the UK that use a cableway without a motor to bring ore down and empty buckets up
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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.
I love that I knew this conversation was going to happen as soon as I read the article.
And, yes.
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
Still might be enough regenerative braking from just the weight of the truck though.
In that case no, because it’d be bringing the weight of the truck and the ore with it.
We achieved perpetuum mobile
Yes, but actually no.
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.
ARGH Why did you have to remind me that Tom Scott is still missing from Youtube!
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.
In other words, OP’s mom.
Boom
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.
Didn’t Tom Scott make a video about this?
Statistically, yes.
Yep.
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.
Or in physics terms, potential energy.
The truck has a penis?
Is that just a gravity battery that just so happens to be a dump truck as well?
I guess it all depends on the physical layout but this seems like a very complicated way to get material downhill.
Wow what a great use case.
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.
I’m pretty sure they’ve been doing this for years in South America already.
Esisyphus
It’s slightly less impressive when you realise they could have built a massive slide instead and got mostly the same result.
Guess it’s better than a massive diesel truck though.
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
Reminds me of some guy with a OneWheel that was saying he’d never charged his board in like a thousand miles as his daily commuter.
He lives near the top of a mountain lift, so he takes it home and just runs on pure regen lol.
So he’s just breaking? What a silly thing to claim. I bet he’s not even regening a lot. When i ride up a mountain until my battery is down to 40% or so and ride down i regenerate around 1% or something. It might even be in the 0.6% or something
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.
That’s genius. Who cares if thermodynamics wins, it weighs less on the way up so works out just fine.
Just like the example in TFA.
Is novel for a dump truck to use this. Of course it’s not a completely new concept entirely.
I think it’s still pretty cool. Turning potential energy to kenetic
Yeah I was gonna say I’m pretty sure this isn’t a single use, disposable vehicle
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.
I hope OpenTTD devs consider adding gravity-based electric transportation of heavy loads as an option
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.
Content aside, what a great video! It’s not that old of a video but it reminds me so much of early YouTube, just friends messing around and posting it with top tier song choice.
Damn, that shit is even hotter
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.
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.
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
Back in my day we drove back and forth to work uphill, both ways, and we only lost weight because we could never afford enough Starbucks and avocado toast!
They must be hauling the load downhill, what about the ones that hauls the load up from an open-pit mine?
Very interesting use case but kind of dependant on this very specific setup? I feel like an even more efficient and low maintenance method would be like… a ramp.
Well sure but if you just dump ore onto a ramp/chute then you’re constained to high angles and material so it can’t also double as a drivable road.
