Belgium’s Hesse-Noord Natie has ordered nine Kalmar Edrive ESC straddle carriers for operation in its River Schelde terminals. Five of the ESCs will have normal spreaders and four will have 50t capacity extendible twinlift spreaders.
Kalmar said that the order represented ‘a huge vote of confidence’ in both the newly developed twinlift spreader technology it uses and its ESC straddle carrier, which combines an electrical drive system with the established CSC straddle carrier, of which more than 1,800 units have been sold to date.
Hesse-Noord Natie first bought two ESCs for testing last year and racked up a 800 operational hours in just the first five weeks of operation.
Kalmar has also taken an order from Hamburger Hafen- und Lagerhaus-AG in Germany for four ESC440 machines for use in its Burchardkai Terminal in Hamburg. This order includes an option for a further four ESC440 straddles.
The Kalmar Edrive is designed to have low noise emission, low fuel consumption, and low maintenance and repair costs, and to use of less hydraulic oil.
The significance of the twinlift spreader is its ability to mirror the handling efficiency of terminal ship-to-shore cranes. A ship-to-shore crane can lower two full 20ft containers 1.5m apart from each other onto the quayside with an extendible twinlift spreader. However, the traditional straddle carrier’s twinlift spreader can only pick up one of these boxes at a time. The breakthrough was achieved when Bromma developed an extendible full twinlift spreader, designed especially for straddle carriers. At present there are five CSCs with twinlift spreaders, lifting productivity at Hesse-Noord Natie’s largest terminal.
