Truck Produces More Energy Than It Uses

[Mike]

It seems plausible to me. It uses gravity in place of traditional fuels.

Electric vehicles are everywhere now. It’s more than just Leafs, Teslas, and a wide variety of electric bikes. It’s also trains, busses, and in this case, gigantic dump trucks. This truck in particular is being put to work at a mine in Switzerland, and as a consequence of having an electric drivetrain is actually able to produce more power than it consumes.

This isn’t some impossible perpetual motion machine, either. The dump truck drives up a mountain with no load, and carries double the weight back down the mountain after getting loaded up with lime and marl to deliver to a cement plant. Since electric vehicles can recover energy through regenerative braking, rather than wasting that energy as heat in a traditional braking system, the extra weight on the way down actually delivers more energy to the batteries than the truck used on the way up the mountain.

SOURCE

[Dave Grubb]

To do a true energy balance, you have to add the energy to mine and load the material it carries. When that is done the equation changes.

As a side note---regenerative charging has been used in off road trucks for years---they are hybrids but utilize the same technology.

[Mike]

To do a true energy balance, you have to add the energy to mine and load the material it carries. When that is done the equation changes....

That's a good point I hadn't considered.

[Dave Grubb]

A mistake I think most people would make---including (possibly) the author.

If his premise were correct, all we need do is place all the world's mines above their refineries---problem solved

[Honda]

Actually I look at it another way. The energy consumed mining and loading is a relatively static number that exists regardless of what form of transportation moves it down the mountain So, yes using this type of electric truck would in fact result in a net energy savings.