Electric good, hydrogen better for construction?

Last April, Sisk – the vast Irish construction company – marked a small but significant event. For the first time on a big Irish construction site the company started to use electrically powered equipment.

Back then, down at the Coopers Cross site in Dublin’s docklands, the piece of equipment in question was a JCB 525-60e telehandler – think of a bigger, more robust, long-reach forklift and you’re getting there – capable of carrying a 2.5-tonne load and powered by a 24kWh battery pack.

It was almost an experiment, kind of a toe-in-the-water effort by both Sisk and JCB. Would an electric vehicle stand up to the rigours of construction site life? Would the lack of noise and the lower emissions be worth the effort of recharging? Would you end up waiting around for the battery to top-up, delaying work?

Well, almost 18 months on, the results are in. Tom Grant, director of assets and internal services at Sisk, is unequivocal.

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“When we put the electric telehandler on to the site we also made sure that there was a diesel-powered version on site too, just in case the electric one might let us down. From the minute we started using the electric JCB, though, we never touched the backup diesel one.”

Not only did the electric telehandler mange to keep up, it actually outpaced what a traditional diesel version might have done.

“Because of the nature of the project at Coopers Cross – a commercial and residential building right in the heart of the city – we knew that we had neighbours and we knew that we had to be conscious of noise. So we’ve used the electric JCB for far more hours than we would have used the diesel equivalent – hours on construction equipment are equivalent to miles on a car,” says Grant. “We were also able to work in the underground section of the site – because, of course, it generates no fumes.”

The benefits of the electric equipment, it turned out, were multilayered. Grant said the reduction in noise was a factor that, if anything, the Sisk team had underestimated. By putting in a charging point on site – one that could be moved around with the telehandler – the battery could be kept topped-up as needed and it eliminated at least some of the necessity to store diesel on the site and have fuel delivered by tanker, a process that can hold up or slow down work.

Sisk’s own research suggests that this single telehandler has saved 22 tonnes of CO2 emissions during its 1,500 hours of work on the Coopers Cross site. Now, that has to be taken alongside the fact that the Irish electricity grid is not emissions-free, but that’s the amount of diesel that has been saved, and there are the indirect savings of not having to truck that much diesel to the site. The telehandler was also used outside the site, making short journeys by road and at no point, according to the team using it, was battery charge or range an issue.

If you removed big civil projects from the equation we could probably go fully-battery on some projects in the morning

—  Tom Grant, Sisk

So, it’s a slam-dunk, then? Electric is now the way to go for construction equipment and heavy plant?

Well, not quite. According to Denis Murray, managing director of ECI JCB, the JCB importer for Ireland, there is a limit to what electric power can do.

“That telehandler and some of the smaller mini-diggers and excavators – that’s about the limit in size of what electric can reasonably do,” says Murray. “The bigger machines, the ones that are five or six or seven tonnes’ weight, those still run on diesel. So, to combat that, JCB has actually invested in designing an engine that can run on liquid hydrogen. Now, that hydrogen is a big challenge because not only do you have to make it, you have to make it in a way that’s sustainable and ‘green’. But we’re working on that at the moment and we should see the first results by around 2025.”

Tom Grant is confident that the hydrogen hurdle can be overcome and that we are only a few short years away from a time when a large construction site will find itself running on purely electric and zero-emissions hydrogen.

“We’re actively looking at how we integrate hydrogen into our business – in terms of safety, in terms of logistics and just the general application,” he says. We’re fairly confident that we have the solutions.

“If you removed big civil projects from the equation we could probably go fully-battery on some projects in the morning, although that does come with a lot of buts, such as the power grid and so on. But we’re even experimenting now with tower cranes driven by batteries and that’s already working well for us in the Glass Bottle site in Dublin.

“I think 2025 is going to be a big turning point in this industry.”