Would it be possible to achieve the same 8 hours of operation between charges?
Second, where is the charge point when you are building a new highway? Roads are usually the first to go in, so if you have to spend an hour driving to a charge point, that's an hour of productive lost
If it's out in the boonies, yeah, power usually follows the roads. If it's existing infrastructure being upgraded, just tap in to what is already there
I like electric vehicles, they make sense. I think most construction workers would like electric equipment as well, not as loud, less fumes, less heat. Overall better but it has to make sense.
Large mine trucks are either electric or hybrid. They recharge as they go into the pit.
Modern train engines are just diesel powered generators pushing electric motors. That's how they can claim 100mpg. They could do similar to the construction equipment, and still improve vs just powered by diesel engines directly.
Diesel generators running at a fixed duty cycle and optimized for efficiency can be way more efficient than a mobile diesel engine operating at a wide range of workloads.
"Diesel" can run on a variety of fuels (diesel, natural gas, propane, etc) so you could probably start synthesizing the fuels if you've somehow got a bunch of energy that'd otherwise be wasted; methane's still a bit of a pain to deal with but not nearly as nasty as H2; for feeding remote generators you'd just compress it not liquefy it, and that's something that's already commonplace today.
There's a more interesting question, in my opinion: what happens when it inevitably runs out?
Diesel is of course absolutely trivial. It can be refueled from any petrol station, you can bring your own barrel with a small pump, or even use a jerrycan. Easy to use both in urban areas and out in the boonies. Battery is a bit trickier. Worksite electric hookups and superchargers are viable urban options, and in remote areas you could use some kind of generator.
Hydrogen, on the other hand, is a bit of a nightmare. Demand for hydrogen is unlikely to be high enough to warrant a very dense network of fueling stations, so even in urban areas it's going to take a significant amount of time to refuel. And in rural areas you're screwed: a fueling station could be hundreds of miles / kilometers away, and you're not exactly going to fill up a jerrycan with hydrogen either! There's no way you are refueling it on-site, having a regular worker messing around with hundreds or thousands of liters of hydrogen at 600x atmospheric pressure or cryogenic temperatures is just waiting for an accident to happen.
As long as 98% of our hydrogen is coming from fossil fuels it’s only a net negative here.
PEV’s are often more convenient and cheaper to use on a work site than diesel and are actually being adopted for that reason, it’s hydrogen that’s lacking distribution infrastructure.
Care to share some examples?
At the other end mini EV excavators are also becoming quite popular ex: Volvo ECR25, Bobcat E19e, etc
Do you even know what makes those mining trucks functional for this use case? The deeper the mine, the more effective they are!
A work crew putting in a trench really benefits from the equipment being quit. What you think of as “digging in your garden” is just one of plentiful examples of home construction scale equipment. There’s a lot of equipment that fits such purposes like rollers for people’s driveways etc.
Here’s a preproduction equivalent to the hydrogen prototype mentioned in the article:
320 Electric Medium Excavator
Operating weight: 22–24 metric tons | 48,501–52,911 lb Bucket capacity: 1.3 m³ | 1.7 yd³ https://www.cat.com/en_US/by-industry/construction/electric-...
That said, people don’t work 8 hours without taking a break so arguably a smaller battery might be a good tradeoff.