MINING
over-capacity in the hoist system do not need to use it for production 100% of the time. They can also use it to balance electrical loadings. You can use the hoist to lower a load rather than to raise it, and thus regenerate electrical power that you can feed back into your grid. By doing that in smart ways you can reduce the peak electrical demands on your system, and so save energy. “Again we are collaborating with customer companies to repurpose old hoists that are not in use as gravity batteries. Of course, the important thing is the sustainability, the energy efficiency, not just of the hoist but of the entire mine as a system. There is an overall drive throughout the industry towards electrification, and efficient electric motors are a key to this. That is way more important than anything else in the whole solution, because we are talking of big machines. We have hoists with 16MW motor configurations, and that is very big indeed. “ABB just recently has been working very
hard on pushing the boundaries when it comes to energy efficiency. Just last month, in May, we announced that we have set a new world record for energy efficiency in a large electric motor. It has achieved an efficiency rating of 99.13%.” The previous record was 99.05%, set also by ABB back in 2017. The theoretical limit of course is an unattainable 100% efficiency. “Getting closer to the 100% target becomes increasingly challenging in terms of the motor design and manufacture. This is why the previous world record stood for eight years.”
While the motor is actually for a steel mill rather than hoist, this achievement is good for the whole industry. It can be hard to grasp the scale of such motors – they are so big that even small percentage savings give very large benefits indeed. Opting for the 99.13% motor rather than the standard design with 98.64% efficiency will enable the customer to save around 61GWh of energy and $5.9m in electricity costs over a 25-year lifespan – equivalent to four days of peak output from the world’s largest offshore wind farm. The capital cost difference has a payback period of just three months. “As a company, we are constantly working footprint, but our
to reduce our own CO2
factories are not that energy intensive. So our biggest contribution to global sustainability is really how we can help our customers to be more sustainable in their operations, and the 99.13% efficiency is of course one way of helping them towards that. “There are very many mine hoists around the world that are 10 or 20 years old and that are much less efficient. We see that especially for larger applications where the motor may be running 24/7. Upgrading and renewing them and modernising the drive trains will save a lot of energy and give short payback times. Those type of investments will be good for sustainability as well as for bottom lines. I think it will be a continuing business for ABB for some years to come. “But it is important also to say that the hoist on its own, even the mine on its own, is not the whole story. Sustainability has to be a
collaboration throughout the chain. It runs from our suppliers, though ourselves and our mining customers, right through to the end user of the metal or mineral that is produced. Making the hoists more sustainable becomes not so beneficial if, say, the people who refine the ore that is hauled up are doing so in an emissions-intensive way. There is a holistic chain all the way through. “I think this an area where the whole world is on the learning curve of closing that chain. There are still steps that needs to be done to close the loop fully. But at ABB we have done deals with some of our customers where we source sustainable minerals and metals, ones with low CO2
content. We put those into our
products. We can take copper as an example as electrical motors need a lot of copper. So that means we can produce motors with a low carbon content, and we can sell that motor back to the mines who want to operate with a low carbon footprint as well. We have done some deals like that, which have agreements to source low carbon minerals and metals, but there is still some way to go before the entire industry is really valuing them as much as they should be. To make it happen the price tag on low carbon materials probably needs to be higher over time.”
Keeping emissions down Jonsson closes with two examples of mines where hoists have played a significant part in increasing the sustainability of both. One is from Australia. BHP’s Prominent Hill mine 650km northwest of Adelaide produces some
34 | July 2025 |
www.hoistmagazine.com
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