24 Replies to “We Don’t Need No Stinking Giant Fans”

    1. To be fair, when I was in university in the mid 1980s, we studied electric haul trucks, both trolley assist and all electric. Big ones too. For diesel powered trucks, the engines on the bigger haul trucks generate electricity for electric motors that drive them. When you get that big, a transmission and drive train gets inefficient. They are well suited to direct electric power. The big shovels used in big open pits are also electric. The loaders are usually diesel as they are not as suited to having a cable. On a somewhat related note, up until about 1975, underground mines in Canada had 0 diesel or other internal combustion engines. Every single thing was either air powered or electric. In places like Timmins, the mines got the electricity from hydro power, so 100% renewable.

      1. Yeah, I hate when SDA posts stuff like this because it is just the dumbest clickbait kind of lazy b*llsh*t. I expect more… this is MSM levels of lazy.

        Hitachi Construction Truck (nee Volvo.. nee Euclid) of Guelph, Ontario has been making these trucks for about 40 years. 90%+ of the trucks that have ever left that factory are direct electric drive because only electric motors on each wheel provide enough torque and power to move these machines fully laden. They are generally powered by overhead tram lines in open pit scenarios (coal, copper mines).
        The actual ICE engine just basically powers the cab and the air conditioning (an exaggeration but not by much).

        1. Thanks for the info on Hitachi.

          I googled Hitachi trucks and from a Hitachi web site learned that the trucks do indeed have electric motor drive, but the motors get their power from an engine.

          Overhead tramlines are usually used on uphill sections.

  2. I have forgotten how long I have been saying that nothing “green” can be built without massive inputs of fossil fuel energy, without coal, oil and gas there would be zero EVs, zero wind turbines and zero solar panels. Even hydro power requires fossil fuels to manufacture the generating capacity. Are they all stupid?

  3. The Productive versus the Parasitic is not a conversation anyone in the Climate Industrial Complex will tolerate.

  4. EVs are a good way to move tailpipe emissions out of crowded cities to *elsewhere*, that’s the only reasonable case for them.

    1. The mom’s of Palo Alto don’t care. Heavy trucks aren’t operating anywhere near their $5.7M 3 bed. 2 bath bungalows. Those heavy trucks don’t deliver their bleach-free, non allergenic, bamboo diapers. So long as there is no dirty fossil fuel tailpipe exhaust near their elementary schools … all the poor people in China and Africa could die horrible cancer deaths for all they care.

  6. Then they’ll wait until all the raw materials are already at the factory, and only then start estimating the energy needed to complete the fabrication of a solar panel. “See – it will only take 20 years to generate the power used to make it.”

  8. That’s quite the number!! Source, please?
    The point is well-taken, but “scary” numbers like that need to be verified before they are trusted. (That was Reagan’s “doctrine.”)

    1. The smallest mine I ever called on was burning 10,000 gallons of diesel a day. Long about 2003.

  9. You could say Suncor’s largest Komatu’s are Electric Trucks;
    Autonomous (no operator)/Electric Drive Wheels,
    78 liter 3500HP 18 cylinder diesel,
    1,384,500 lbs GVW incl 800,000 lbs payload @ 65km/hr.

  10. As noted in a reply above, it isn’t particularly revolutionary to convert haul trucks to electric power. The wheels on the big ones are driven by motors, not the engine. The issue here is, as with all things electric, how is the electricity generated. For a mine, it may be practical to have wind mills and solar panels. This is the case now in the high arctic where it costs a fortune to haul in diesel. For you and me, not so much. For most of the planet, an all electric future means coal fired generators. The Chinese are well on their way to making this happen and the Indians are just getting started. It isn’t for “the environment”. It is to reduce smog in the cities. They don’t care about global warming. They want clean air. For them that means coal fired electrical generating stations. Thousands of them.

    1. Now do other prime movers, Locomotives: Diesel-electric.

      In the high arctic case, you’d have to use double the amount of fuel to haul enough materials up there to make wind turbines and solar panels, the latter of which would be useless in the arctic winter, with only a couple hours of weak sunlight a day. Unless it’s diamonds, you’d have to wait until winter to haul out the product and large goods in, over the ice roads. how are you supposed to store all the summer energy to last all winter? Batteries? Those are heavy too. Instead, you can just haul in the fuel (stored energy) and have the mine running continuously all year, perhaps still waiting for winter to do the big moves.. It’s the nature of the beast.

      Can you imagine how many batteries and how long or how much energy to charge up an electric powered container ship?

  12. Is that really his name, same as his daddy and his daddy before, who learnt a thing or two from Charlie, don’t you know?

  13. This is one of those “the problem is too big to solve” problems. Break the problem into small parts. Start with EVs in big cities to improve air quality. Make it mandatory. Leave everything else alone. Then move to the next easiest to solve problem. At some point diesel will triumph over electric for certain applications. Leave it be. We’re trying to turn everything into unsolvable rocket science. Most of us don’t live in the Arctic. Most of us live around the equator in overcrowded cities with terrible air pollution. But high-Arctic locomotives…

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