Think of this: you come to the jobsite on a beautiful Monday, and you're ready to work. You go to set the first drywall screw of the week, and you look down to see that your trusty Milwaukee drill is out of juice. "Oh no", you think to yourself, "how will I get anything done today?" Thankfully, your coworker on the site offers you his spare battery, and you get rolling.
ZQuip takes swappable batteries to the next level
ZQuip, a subsidiary of Moog Construction, is doing on a much larger scale. They're on a mission to make easily swappable battery packs for converted pieces of heavy equipment. They recently showed proof of concept with a converted CAT 308 excavator. Moog Construction is close to our hearts here at ConEquip Parts, as they're another local Buffalo NY company. Keep it up!
"Great, more batteries to charge."
ZQuip has thought of that too. No more waiting to charge, just switch out the battery like you would on your Milwaukee drill, and get back to work. This is possible because of an interchangeable and modular design that will fit multiple machines. Skid steers might need one battery, but an excavator might need four to do a job. When not in use on one machine, you can just swap it over to the machine that needs it.
"I don't want to send in my equipment to get this conversion"
Well, who would! ZQuip aims to make this process as easy as possible, and to cause as little interferance as possible. Thus, the process is DIY, with assistance from them, according to their notes. No need to send your equipment to gosh knows where, wait forever to get it back, and hope that it's all in order.
"It'll take forever to change these packs out!"
Chris LaFleur, the managing director of ZQuip, said that the battery packs can be easily switched out in about 5 minutes. Although the process hasn't been demonstrated yet, we imagine that it will require the help of a piece of equipment on site to move the battery around, as they're probably quite heavy.
"Have they done any machines yet?"
ZQuip has demonstrated the conversion on a CAT 308 excavator, but says that it can be done on any make or model. These batteries can exist in three settings. On the machine in use, off the machine on a charger, and off the machine as a generator.
"Is this really what we need right now?"
LaFleur spent a lot of time on jobsites with contractors, and mentioned that their goal wasn't to figure out what the industry needs, but why they weren't accepting electric machines. Analysis proved there were more issues than simply placing a zero-emission machine on a diesel jobsite.
"In order for people to adopt it's got to be productive. and it's got to make sense for their operations... it's got to work at a site level and at a fleet level" he says. A fleet owner could utilize this system by making sure that they have certain levels of battery capacity on site for each job.
Say you have a larger machine that requires 1.2 mWh of capacity, and three that require 400kWH. Your total energy needed for the day would be 2.4 mWh. Most standard electric vehicles today would all come with 800 kWh batteries on each machine, meaning that you'd be paying for more capacity than you need in some cases. That capacity would go unused, and it's argued that the raw materials spent making those batteries could be put to better use elsewhere.
Do you think it will work?
In order for this to be adopted across the board, it needs to be a few things. Cost effective, easy to install and service, and actually be able to put up with the work environment. If it's expensive and hard to upkeep, or the batteries need to be constantly switched out, nobody is going to pick it up. Wouldn't it be awesome if all equipment were as easy to fuel up as your Milwaukee drill?
