POWER GENERATION Ӏ CRANE BATTERIES
and in a city mains grid power is available close to hand. So plug in your tower crane; problem solved. But not, alas, always. “Tower cranes take very little
power when you average out their consumption over the days of a construction project,” says Gil De Backer. He is business development manager of Belgian scale-up company Neargrid Solutions. “But those cranes are very uneven in their consumption. In the short periods when they are lifting heavy loads their consumption peaks:
The LR1130
from Liebherr – from their latest unplugged range
they need a lot of power just then. And many city locations have grid power that is just not enough to supply those peaks.” There is a conventional
solution: “Normally in the past and still today, construction companies use on-site diesel generators to power their electric tower cranes.” If that seems a perverse, indeed nonsensical, way of reducing diesel emissions, it is. Happily there is now a better solution.
GREEN SOLUTION “We provide an ecological green alternative for that,” continues De Backer. “We have a battery system that replaces the generator. We supply battery blocks, with high-power inverters coupled to them, and all the safety equipment and battery management systems installed around them to make each one a completely integrated system to plug and play on a construction site. “The battery block is
really focussed on being a replacement for those diesel gensets. It has the same usability, the same functionality as the genset, it does not require any additional on-site knowledge of electricity to handle
our system. It is really customer- centric,” he says. One use for the battery system is on sites where there is grid electricity but not enough for a tower crane. “Often on such sites there is some power available – perhaps there is a normal residential grid connexion in the next street. What our batteries do is make the best use of that. We take that small local connection – say between 16-amp and 63-amp three-phase at 400 V – and we connect it to the inlet side of a battery system. So it will always be trickle-charging our system throughout the day and night. And such a connection actually has enough energy when you average it out. Our battery acts as a buffer, delivering its reserves of energy to the crane at times of peak load demand, then recharging itself the rest of the time. “We have two systems: the
‘Boost’ can power one crane and weighs 3.1 tonnes; so it is placed next to the crane, and can be positioned by a large forklift or by a mobile crane. The ‘Force’ can power three cranes and weighs only 4.1 tonnes, so it can be delivered and positioned in the same way.” Even when there is no mains grid at all on-site to deliver the trickle-charge, the system can still be useful. “It is also possible to use a small diesel genset to charge the battery block. On a construction site with two cranes, you would normally have two 200 kVA gensets next to each crane. We can reduce that to a single 60 kVA genset, running perhaps all day, with our battery pack in between them. And that will clearly make fewer emissions and lower consumption than a big generator working intermittently.” And what, exactly, is inside
the Neargrid battery pack? If you guessed a lithium battery you'd
30 CRANES TODAY
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