IN THE DOCK | COMBILIFT
ELECTRIC FOCUS ON
Paul Short, president of Combilift North America, oversees operations, sales, marketing, and customer service for the US and Canada, covering among other things straddle carriers and logistics in ports. Here he talks to DLM about the electrification of equipment, The California Air Resources Board (CARB) regulation to phase out operation of large Spark-Ignited (LSI) forklifts and a growing need for safety.
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ombilift has been working with port operations and dock operations for a number of years. We have equipment
assisting in the recovery of AGVs (Automated Guided Vehicles) with our Straddle Carriers (Combi-SC). We are handling containers with our straddle carriers and large offshore components for the wind turbine industry with our Mobile Gantry (Combi-MG) We’ve been working with these industries for quite some time. On the port side with their AGVs, they have been automating and electrifying their operations for a long time and states such as California are going further into that electrification of forklifts, engine powered vehicles and Combilift has been designing in our R&D department to meet that demand. Almost all of Combilift’s equipment is electrified up to 30,000 lbs on a forklift, 65% of our production is electric that comes out of the factory. And then we’ve got new models that we’ve developed such as the Combi-CB 155E (Counterbalance), which is a larger capacity CB, that’s multi directional, and can be used in port side operation and dockside, which has been developed only as an electric machine, launched in 2023. California’s been driving a lot of the
regulation with carbon neutral, and they’ve always had the strictest emissions and driving stricter emissions. And now they’ve moved to their electrification of over the road trucks. There are new regulations coming in,
on January 1, 2026, to more or less remove the sale of LP gas engines or large spark ignition engines. So that will push either
The Combi-SC (Straddle Carrier) is ideal for the most extreme load handling situations.
towards diesel or electric units for those applications. So, there’s regulations to limit the older technologies and drive new technologies in California. They’re definitely at the forefront of pushing this towards electrification for sure. Ports in the US have always been looking at this and trying to lower their emissions, and obviously they are a big contributor to local emissions because of the engines running at ports with the ships and the vessels. They also want ship to shore power to remove those engines running and electrification of cranes and everything around it. So, ports are probably second in the US after California, but California is definitely driving it across the board and other industries.
xiv | October 2024 | Dockside Lift & Move Supplement I’ve been in the industry now for about
25 years, and I’ve seen a lot of changes in terms of advancements in technology. A lot of the industries have become more sophisticated and they’re wanting to see their utilisation, they want to have their uptime, and much better reliability on their equipment and having more advanced systems on their equipment. Telematics has become a big part of the business to see the utilisation and the remote diagnostics of equipment, which has also been built onto our systems with Combi Connect, so we can track equipment with GPS. We can log in remotely, we update software, we can change settings and diagnose any fault remotely from anywhere where our equipment is connected.
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