Industrial companies all-in on green drive

China's machinery enterprises are actively relying on green transformation to seek sustainable development, as well as to better meet the country's carbon peak and neutrality goals.

Leading construction machinery company Sany Group built an energy-saving demonstration factory－Plant 18－becoming the first such facility in the construction machinery industry to collect and calculate carbon emissions in real time via digital modalities.

As a carbon monitoring platform driven by industrial internet and blockchain technology, it is designed to measure and control carbon emissions. It converts energy data such as electricity, oil and gas consumption into carbon emissions by multiplying emissions factors, and displays them in real time. By connecting meters measuring water, electricity, oil and gas, all the details of energy usage can be tracked.

Plant 18's carbon emissions performance is less than 15 kilograms per 10,000 yuan ($1,450) of output value, which is among leading position in the manufacturing industry, according to a report launched by public welfare organization Operation Earth.

This year, Sany spent 1 billion yuan on building a "lighthouse factory", which is also a "green factory", in Ningxiang, Hunan province, achieving an annual production capacity of 8,000 units of tower cranes. Some 70 percent of production processes are completed using intelligent robots, and the internet of things big data platform will notice the imperfections along the assembly line. It has raised the production efficiency by 400 percent over traditional factories, reducing the time to launch a standard section of high-end products to just 11 minutes.

Oil price fluctuations have also accelerated the electrification of construction machinery. As a leading enterprise in China's excavation machinery industry, Liugong Machinery Co Ltd is increasingly reliant on electrification, having already launched a series of electric excavator products.

Yet the operating performance of Liugong's electric excavator is comparable to diesel-powered equivalents, and operating costs are even lower. For every liter of diesel consumed by diesel excavators, Liugong's electric excavators save individual operators 60-70 percent of energy costs per hour and more than 200,000 yuan in annual energy consumption and maintenance costs.

In May, Liugong released its second-generation electric loaders, which are expected to significantly help customers save operating costs.

"The company will add more members to its electric product family and launch large pure-electric loaders and excavators in Europe and North America in the second half of this year," said Zhao Ming, vice-president of Liugong's Electric Technology and Product Research Institute.

Xie Zongbo, an independent financial columnist, said: "The green transition in the machinery industry is an inevitable trend under the country's carbon neutrality goals. With the gradual drop in the cost of heavy machinery electric vehicles, there is more possibility for green transformation. It is expected that with improvements in the lithium battery industrial chain, the electrification process of China's heavy machinery will be accelerated in the coming years."

A report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance showed that in the future, the heavy machinery sector will be a major drive for new energy applications.

"To promote the electrification of the sector, related services, including battery swapping and quick charging, should be improved, thus boosting the development of the sector," Xie said.

He Jingwei contributed to this story.