Andrew Forrest, the billionaire boss of iron ore giant and now green energy leader Fortescue, has mocked a front page story in the Murdoch tabloid The Daily Telegraph, that dismisses electric semi trailers as a “green dream.”
The Daily Telegraph story, titled “Try Running this on a battery”, quotes “experts” as saying it will take decades for the Australian trucking industry to achieve. And it includes an “editorial” that states the “technology just is not available.”
It was all too much for Forrest, who posted a photo of the Daily Telegraph front page juxtaposed with a picture of one of Fortescue giant electric haul trucks that are due to arrive at its mining operations in the Pilbara in coming months, having already completed trials over the past year.
“You think semi-trailers can’t run on batteries?” Forrest wrote on his LinkedIn post.
“We could load more than 5 of them onto this electric truck. “Experts” say heavy vehicles going electric will take decades. We say years.
“Our first Liebherr T 264 battery electric haul truck arrives in months, and our entire fleet – hundreds of vehicles – will be electric by 2030.”
Fortescue, of course, has set an ambitious target of reaching “real zero” at its giant Pilbara mining operations by 2030, and has hinted it may reach that landmark milestone of burning no gas or diesel for power or transport even earlier.
It is building two gigawatts of large scale wind and solar, backed by 4.5 gigawatt hours of battery storage, and plans to replace its entire fleet of huge 264 tonne haul trucks, and other mining equipment, by that time. It has already replaced 15 of 70 excavators with electric ones, each of which are saving one million litres of diesel a year.
Forrest might also have mentioned New Energy Transport’s first delivery by an electric heavy truck of a load between Sydney and Canberra, a delivery it says cost just a fraction of the fuel cost of a diesel truck, and was completed in a single charge and much faster than diesel trucks, which struggle up hills.
New Energy Transport hopes to introduce heavy electric truck routes from Sydney to Newcastle, Wollongong and Canberra, and extend these to other cities in coming years. It plans its first big electric truck depot south of Sydney, and has plans for others.
The federal government has announced plans for another three electric truck charging hubs in Melbourne, to cater for the increased number of intra-city electric truck deliveries. Volvo, meanwhile, has just announced an extended range version of its heavy electric truck that will be able to cover more than 700 kms on a single charge.
See also: Australia has only two refineries – one of them is on fire
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Giles Parkinson is founder and editor of The Driven, and also edits and founded the Renew Economy and One Step Off The Grid web sites. He has been a journalist for nearly 40 years, is a former business and deputy editor of the Australian Financial Review, and owns a Tesla Model 3.