Over the course of these past weeks and months the global media and international politics have had a razor focus on COP 26 and the critical issue of climate change. Reports of the countless hundreds of powerful and well-meaning speeches and who-knows how many lofty promises have dulled the attention of even the most ardently concerned. Needless to say, this is an issue of critical importance to the entire planet but, sadly, one often discussed in terms disconnected from the daily lives of citizens and activities of businesses.

For over fifty years, power generation and usage in their various forms have been issues in which the crane industry has been heavily involved. Starting in the early 1960s with the first lattice boom cranes of 100-tons capacity, as crane capacity quickly escalated, customer and project demands for lifting ever-heavier pieces to ever-greater heights similarly escalated. And, over those years, since the very first ‘Cranes’ magazine back in 1966, barely an issue has been printed without a mention of the involvement of cranes in power generation and distribution. Indeed, that year we reported on the re-lining of a blast furnace operated by a leading tinplate manufacturer in Ebbw Vale, South Wales. A rented British-built Babcock-Weitz 280B saddle jib tower crane safely removed and replaced a 10t bell unit 43m (140ft) above ground level in just 3½ minutes – against the contractors estimated time of 2½ hours!

In late 1984 at the invitation of the UK’s Central Electricity Generation Board, Cranes Today visited the 4000 mw Drax power plant as it neared completion in north Yorkshire. As Europe’s largest power plant, we reported (apparently with some pride) that it would ‘consume 37 trainloads of coal every day’! Large numbers of mobile cranes – mainly Coles, Ruston-Bucyrus, Priestman and NCK – were in evidence but, of course, in those days most mobile cranes were of quite modest lifting capacity and reach. Given the long booms and jibs needed for reach on such projects, contractors and architects planned jobs around relatively light loads – often meaning hundreds of lifts at wide radius and many months on the job site. In fact, work on Drax had started some 18-years earlier in 1966! Perhaps non-surprisingly given the contractor’s use of two very-old tower cranes made in Glasgow by Sir William Arrol whose gantry crane had built the RMS ‘Titanic’ for Harland & Wolff.

BIG CRAWLERS TRANSFORMED POWER PLANT CONSTRUCTION

By the time of our visit to Drax, Mannesmann-Demag had already supplied a fully-hydraulic 1,200-tonne capacity CC 2000 RL (Ring Lift) for nuclear power plant construction in Bulgaria. In fact Demag had designed and built this – by-far its largest crawler crane – just eight years after developing their first fully hydraulic crawler crane – the 80-tonne capacity CC280 – quite a jump! The CC 2000RL was rated 350t @ 50m radius for the construction of a nuclear power plant project in Bulgaria. The contrast with the cranes being used at Drax could not have been more stark!

Similarly the approach adopted by Hitachi in Japan was also years ahead of UK practice. Japan’s first commercial nuclear power reactor began operating in mid-1966 – ten years after the UK’s Windscale nuclear accident. In September 1981, Bechtel, acting on behalf of Hitachi, approached the Neil F. Lampson Company in Kennewick, Washington State regarding their Transi-Lift heavy crawler cranes. In October 1983, on behalf of Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), Hitachi began work on the 11,000mw Kariwa nuclear power plant 20km from Niigata. After extensive negotiations between Hitachi and Lampson a crane specification decision was reached – defining the use of a 103m main boom, 36.6m jib and max capacity of 840t @ 30m radius. The crane arrived on site in May 1985.

By the time Cranes Today arrived on site in Japan in late 1985 the Transi-Lift had already completed some 40 lifts over a period of some five months. Thanks to Hitachi’s modular design of the reactor, the number of lifts had been reduced by 11 to just 17 with the largest of these being 305t. Ahead for the crane in November 1987 lay the installation of an 8.4m long, 735-tonne reactor at 55m radius. The job demanded the use of a 103m boom with the load being lifted 47.5m and lowered through an opening of just 9m with a clearance at either side of only 300mm.

More recently, in December 2010, Hitachi ordered the largest Transi-Lift to date, the 3,000-ton capacity LTL-3000 for work on the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear plant. Soon afterwards, the tragic 2011 Fukushima earthquake and tsunami disaster caused enormous disruptions including long and on-going delays to the delivery of the Lampson crane now owned by Hitachi. Most recently, in July 2021 TEPCO stated that the plant would not be re-started until fiscal 2022 at the earliest. Meanwhile, as a consequence of the cost of decommissioning the Fukushima- Daiichi plant TEPCO’s very future seems in doubt. Meanwhile TEPCO has outlined plans to invest up to Y3,000 billion ($27 billion) by fiscal 2030 for decarbonization efforts and Hitachi’s LTL 3000 remains in Washington State, being regularly inspected and function tested.

For decades during the 1960s-1970s the market for large-size crawler cranes had been dominated by Manitowoc and American Hoist. Indeed Manitowoc’s ‘Ringer’ and American’s ‘Sky Horse’ had been break-through developments allowing heavier lifting capacities than previously possible. However, although very strong and reliable these heavy, mechanical cranes were relatively difficult to erect, transport and operate. And the world was changing. In 1982-3, another totally new crane was designed expressly by Liebherr Werk Ehingen to meet the needs on Ontario Hydro (See our Cranes Today interview with former Liebherr chief engineer Hans-Dieter Willim in May 2019 ‘Designing the crane industry’). At the time the largest crawler crane ever built, the LR 1600 was designed to handle 356t heat exchangers at 46m height at the Darlington Nuclear plant. Things were also changing on the other side of the world – since its August 1984 introduction, Kobelco had shipped fifteen of its 450-tonne capacity 7450 crawler cranes mainly for steam and nuclear power plants in Japan.

Clearly, the writing had long been on the wall. The days of the mechanical crane were over. Regrettably, those companies so heavily-vested in the design, manufacture and sale of those wonderful old cranes were not reading the writing on the wall.

Disposing of nuclear waste has long been a major preoccupation of the US Dept of Energy – specifically focussed on the former nuclear power facility at Hanford in Washington State where a 1,000-ton Transilift had been employed in 1979. Over a period of several recent years, with the significant support of Bechtel, a large vitrification plant has been constructed to convert the dangerous radioactive waste to stable gas. It has been operating successfully and with exemplary levels of safety these recent years. These operations are supported by a fleet of Genie and JLG aerial work platforms working alongside some 33 cranes ranging from small Grove, Link-Belt and Terex telescopics, Link-belt lattice cranes, a 650-tonne Demag with luffing boom and several tower cranes including three 50-tonne capacity Potain MD 1400s working to 73m (240ft) height.

The spiralling cost of decommissioning nuclear plants and disposing of the nuclear waste is a political ‘hot potato’ in many ‘pioneering’ nuclear power nations – not least the UK. When Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth opened the world’s first nuclear power plant at Calder Hall (since known as Sellafield) in 1956 it was hailed as ‘the dawn of the atomic age’. Nearby Workington, Cumbria, became the first town in the world to receive heat, light and power from atomic energy. The plant was originally built with the aid of a Wolffkran WK 150 luffing boom tower crane. In 2014 the cost of decommissioning was estimated at a staggering £70 billion. By November 2020 those costs had near doubled to £132 billion. Most recently the UK Government’s website describes Sellafield ‘as a large and complex site that ranks as one of Europe’s largest industrial complexes managing more radio-active waste in one place than any other nuclear facility in the world’.

Regarding the global picture, Global Energy Monitor estimates that worldwide there are some 10,000 retired, operating or planned coal-fired power plants. The vast majority of these were built by mobile and crawler cranes and during their operating lives have been serviced, updated and repaired by cranes. Today the electricity sector accounts for over 50% of total CO2 emissions from existing assets with 40% coming from coal-fired power plants alone. The next largest carbon-emitting sector is heavy industry – steel, cement, chemicals, etc, – which account for approx. 30% of total emissions. Advanced economies tend to have much older power plants than emerging and developing countries where over the past decade or two investment has been much stronger in the likes of China, India, etc.

In India while power generated by fossil-fuel plants still continues to rise, the government has ambitious long-term plans to grow solar-powered electricity output. Today solar in the sub-continent provides less than one-sixth of the power generated by ‘king coal’ but it is planned for this to draw level by 2029.

MIXED MESSAGES?

The decision by Beijing’s President Xi Jinping not to attend COP 26 was called ‘a big mistake’ by US President Joe Biden. However, despite all the rhetoric and scepticism, there’s no disguising the fact that in some cases these climate-related decisions will have or are already having significant impact on the lives of millions, indeed billions, of people.

Back in January China’s energy regulator suspended 130 coal-fired power plants that were underway in thirteen provinces. Their installed capacity was over 120 GW and followed an earlier announcement that China planned to increase solar and wind capacity by 130 GW. To put this in context, China was already ‘leading’ the world in building new coal-fired plants, building more than three-times as much new coal-powered capacity as all of the rest of the world combined in 2020. According to the think-tank ‘Carbon Tracker’ together with India, Indonesia, Vietnam and Japan, China accounted for over 80% of the coal power stations across the world. Still China had established itself as a renewable energy leader accounting for more than 50% of the world’s growth in renewable energy in 2020 as well as leading in electric vehicles, batteries and solar power. In addition, China’s carbon dioxide emissions growth slowed in Q2 2021.

Against this ‘optimistic’ backdrop, it came as something of a shock when in August, China announced it was now planning to build 43 new coal-fired power plants and 18 new blast furnaces. It was estimated that this would add 1.5% to China’s current annual emissions. Commenting on this, the lead analyst at the Helsinki-based Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), Lauri Myllyvirta, said ‘I think it’s clear that there’s already a shift from the runaway expansion of all kinds of industry and construction we’ve seen in the past year and a bit of trying to act to at least moderate the pace’.

PRICE INCREASES

Indeed. As George Magnus, a research associate at the Oxford University China Centre, said ‘Beijing has been forced to revise its plans… China has stumbled into an energy crisis in much the same way as the rest of us have done but it is exacerbated by the fact that their grid and electricity companies are subject to price controls and cannot pass the prices on. Many have decided to shut down production and they have had a lot of power outages for households and companies.’ Echoing the same messages, Premier Li Keqiang stressed the importance of regular energy supply after parts of China were plunged into darkness by rolling blackouts, hitting both factories and homes.

Obviously, in China, just as in the rest of the world, such issues as power cuts, etc are politically incendiary. It’s been reported that China’s top two coal producing provinces – Shanxi and Inner Mongolia – have been ordered to support the country’s power supply crisis. A reflection of the ‘pinch’ in which some of China’s manufacturers are finding themselves is in the announcement made on the website of Jiaxing Jingyang Construction Machinery Co. Ltd (www.jingyangroup.com) – the leading international supplier of passenger hoists and GJJ tower cranes. The company announced that it is suffering from Chinese Government electricity cut-offs, increased raw material costs and import parts supply delays. Jingyang says because ‘they are losing too much money’ they have had to increase machine and parts prices, adjust delivery schedules and, since May, cancel any contracts signed without payment and invalidate earlier quotations. The price increases amount to +8% on hoist and tower crane parts; +15% on whole hoist units; + 11.5% on tower cranes; +12% on imported electric components; and +5.5% on Chinese electric parts.

INDONESIA’S PLIGHT

Turning abroad where, often under the Belt and Road initiative, China has participated in building coal-fired power plants in emerging nations, President Xi has pledged to cease such activities. Within S.E. Asia, the region’s most populous nation, Indonesia has largely ignored the transition to renewables and grown ever more reliant on foreign (mainly Chinese) investment to support its coal-fired power projects. The Suralaya power plant in Banten province has the second largest operating coal-based capacity linked to China.

Indonesia has the worst air pollution in SE Asia and eleventh worst in the world. In 2014 Indonesia initiated a 35GW power procurement programme that drew in new coal projects involving Chinese companies, banks and developers. Now, following China’s announcement that it would ‘not build new coal-fired power plants abroad’ almost 80GW of planned coal power projects backed by China are suddenly effectively ‘dead in the water’. C.R.E.C. found that since 2017 twice as much coal-fired power capacity linked to China has been either shelved or cancelled than constructed in Indonesia. Still Indonesia is seventh in the global league table of the most coal-fired power plants with 77. But it's not just an Indonesian problem, during the past five years the construction of coal-powered projects outside of China has collapsed.

Indeed the past couple of years have been difficult for Indonesia. Covid and lock-down were blamed for a 2% reduction of 2020 GDP as foreign direct investment contracted by 22%. Overall construction activity declined by 2.8% and mobile crane sales declined by over 20%. While mining was also squeezed, the growing and most valuable use of nickel and tin, effective January 2020 caused the Government to ban the export of these raw materials as it attempts to encourage downstream investment in the local manufacture of batteries and electric vehicles.

In an effort to boost the economy, the government of President Joko Widodo (locally known as Jokowi) has announced an investment package worth $47.8 billion as well as a medium-term development plan to invest $412 billion to develop transport, industry, energy and housing by 2024. The investment in infrastructure projects is expected to boost the steel industry prompting the Chinese to invest in local steel production due to the strict Chinese governmental limits of steel exports.

As part of their strategy to combat the low prices of Chinese machinery, Japanese manufacturers have been developing production in SE Asia where their costs are lower than at home in Japan. Of course, this can only last until it starts to impact Japanese domestic employment. Although not widely-recognised as a machinery manufacturing base, both Hitachi Construction Machinery Co and Komatsu have long-established and large excavator and construction machinery plants in Indonesia. In 2011 they were joined by Sumitomo Construction Machinery Co which built a new excavator plant in Indonesia which in 2019 increased its production capacity. Strategically these plants offer an alternative to the lower-cost imported Chinese competition. In that respect Thailand serves a similar purpose for the production of small truck loader cranes for both Furukawa-Unic and Tadano Ltd while most recently Kato chose a new plant in the Philippines to manufacture its latest 60-tonne capacity truck cranes. In 2017 XCMG opened a branch in Jakarta. The manufacturer’s market in Indonesia had doubled and they claimed to be market leader with their mobile cranes, tower cranes and various other products.

The fact is that not only power generation in China but also Japan, India and most all SE Asian nations is heavily coal-dependent. So, moving production around the region may cut production costs in the short term but it won’t significantly cut emissions.

CHANGE IS DIFFICULT AND COSTLY

Spiralling energy prices are also hitting some of the world’s richest and most successful countries. High prices on spot electricity futures on the Singapore Exchange (SGX) have resulted in the reduction of pipeline gas supplies from Indonesia causing Singaporean power utilities to look to switch to LNG.

While most of the world has (or is) finally reaching the conclusion that fossil fuels have to go, pockets of resistance remain as vested interests fight for their future. This is not the case in the US! While in 2020 40% of US electricity was generated by natural gas, 19% was still generated by coal-fired plants and 20% by nuclear, the coal share is rapidly declining. Encouragingly, the 2021 forecast of the US Energy Information Administration is for solar to take 39% of new capacity, followed by wind with 31%. Natural gas is seen as declining to just 16%.

India has a relatively-long history with nuclear power starting with two small boiling water reactors that became operable at Tarapur in 1969. Today India has 22 nuclear power plants in operation with another seven under construction. But India has been forward-looking in its purchases of large crawler cranes. In 1987 India’s Atomic Energy Authority purchased its first heavy lift cranes – two 650-tonne capacity Liebherr LR 1650s and subsequently acquired additional LR 1650s. In 2008 a 1,350-tonne Liebherr LR 11350 was acquired for use in the construction of the Kalpakkam Nuclear Plant while in 2011 Bharat purchased a 750-tonne Manitowoc 18000.

Nevertheless, more than 50% of India’s electricity is generated by coal-fired plants and almost 61% by all thermal plants. But India’s use of renewables is growing, especially in the on-shore wind farm sector.

In 2016-17 the leading crane rental company Amrik Singh purchased has six 650-tonne capacity Sany SCC 6500s while India’s largest crane rental company Sanghvi Movers recently received an order for the hire of mobile cranes of up to 800-tonnes capacity valued at Rs 20 Crore ($2.7 million). Sanghvi’s huge fleet includes large numbers of Terex- Demag and Sany crawler cranes.

Despite the huge potential of India’s 7,600km coastline and having established the National Offshore Wind Energy policy six years ago, little has happened. Similarly, India’s prime minister was a no-show at COP!

While there are 252 operational coal-fired plants in the US, there are 1,082 in China and 281 in India. Obviously, the proximity of substantial coal deposits has long been a decisive factor in the history of electric power generation. Also high on the list of countries with the most coal-fired power plants are Japan, Russia, Germany and Poland. In 2018 there were significant demonstrations against new commissioning of a new coal power plant ‘Datteln’ in North Rhine-Westphalia. Chancellor Angela Merkel took decisive action offering €4.35b ($4.85b) to compensate affected energy companies, eight coal fired plants were closed down; €14b was offered to affected states plus €26b for further cases.

Clearly there’s a long way to go post COP-26. No doubt the next Paris round will be an eye-opener as to just how many promises and pledges were kept…