Geekwire’s Bryan Corliss interviewed Chris Voorhees about First Mode’s work on a hydrogen power system that will go into a 3-story tall, 1 million pound truck! In just a few months, the First Mode team will take the generator that’s being built in Seattle to South Africa where it will be retrofitted into a massive, ultra-class haul truck for Anglo American.
Article excerpt:
Ultra-class haul trucks are a far different type of vehicle than the Mars rovers the First Mode teams have worked on in the past.
For starters, they’re as tall as a three-story building, and they weigh “about a million pounds,” Voorhees said. They’re built to carry up to 300 metric tons of ore from open-pit mines to nearby processing plants. Anglo-American operates fleets of these dinosaur-sized Tonka trucks at its mines, each one burning thousands of gallons of diesel to fuel the 2-megawatt on-board generator that powers each vehicle.
“It’s a lot of diesel and you have dozens of machines running continuously on site,” he said. Taking just one of the haulers out of operation will eliminate about as much in carbon emissions as 10,000 diesel-powered automobiles.
First Mode is designing and building a hydrogen fuel cell generator to do just that.
Check out the full article for more details about what makes this technology different from anything that’s come before it and to learn how this project could make a difference long-term for the future of clean energy.
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