By: Luca Ceschinelli, Project Development Principal at Aggreko Africa, Middle East, and Asia
Energizing a mining operation is a huge expense, but it presents the biggest opportunity for you to optimize costs and help you meet your ESG goals. Energy costs for approximately 30% of a mine’s total operating costs, therefore it is critical for mining companies to optimize their power infrastructure to optimize their profits.
Aggreko has been working as a long-term energy partner with mining operations across the globe and in Africa, guiding them on the right energy mix to achieve their energy transition aspirations. The company works alongside the mining companies to provide a tailored solution that is most suited to where they are in the energy transition. These partnerships are driven by Aggreko’s commitment to creating better energy solutions with its clients.
With mining companies in all corners of the world facing capital expenditure constraints, the idea of updating or decarbonizing their systems can seem like a distant and complex goal. Aggreko works with mining companies to accelerate their energy transition visions and journey, by assisting them to optimize their current power infrastructure and set-up and upgrade their power technology to the most efficient available on the market. Aggreko further helps mining companies transition to lower-impact carbon fuels such as gas through LNG or LPG virtual pipelines or hybridizing their thermal plants by adding solar and energy storage via batteries.
The implementation of hybrid power is one way in which miners can drastically improve efficiency and their bottom lines. As mines are going deeper and more remote than ever before, finding innovative ways to keep costs and emissions in check is an ongoing challenge.
Hybrid power plants combine the advantages of renewable energy and battery storage with the reliability of thermal generators. The integration of different components comes with some complexity but is needed to ensure a reliable supply of energy, particularly in industries such as mining, where downtime is not only costly but poses a health risk. This is where it is critical to work with a long-term energy partner such as Aggreko to navigate the complexities and ensure that the integration is optimized to yield the best, most reliable and most cost-effective results. Once installed, the costs of producing solar power are almost zero – and so are emissions.
Our battery and energy storage systems gives you greater power quality and resilience and deliver savings to your project, by improving the overall plant efficiency and thereby reducing fuel consumption and carbon emissions.