Mining by Moonlight to Save Energy

[phantom power]

Mining uses much more electricity than most other heavy industries, so it makes sense to move that high energy use to off-peak hours, because that evens out the demand on the grid, making it possible to squeeze more power out of fewer dirty electric plants, and to use more clean energy.

So the Ontario government has just asked the nickel-mining giant XStrada, and the second-largest mining company in the world, Vale; to work nights.

...

Under the new pricing structure, the two giant mining operations stand to reduce their giant electricity bills, as much as 15%. An Xstrata representative said equipment and operations that use a lot of power such as the skips used to haul ore out of their mines could be operated at off-peak periods instead of during the day, according to local news outlet Northern Life.

...

And mining is not the only heavy industry that is being prodded by the Ontario government to working the night-shift with these new incentive rates. All told, about 200 of the province’s heaviest electricity users will be affected by the new rate structure pushing them to work nights.

http://cleantechnica.com/2010/09/26/mining-by-moonlight-to-save-energy/

[Brickbat]

1. Hope the workers get a night differential for this.

What a disruptive change!

[Rabrrrrrr]

2. And then when they all go nights, it'll be cheaper to use electricity during the day...

:crazy:

This is a good idea, though - makes sense, especially since it appears that it isn't a 24-hour a day operation anyway.

[madokie]

3. I worked at a gray iron foundry for 12 years

brother and I upgrading the equipment to using process controllers instead of the relay cabinets they had been using and during that time the local coal plant where they were buying their power from gave them a big discount if they'd let them, the power company, control when they used the furnaces. The smelting furnaces are induction and so is the holding furnaces. We made the connections and from that day on the foundry would load the furnace and then put in a request to GRDA, the power company, for power and then when they decided it would be best they'd allow the foundry to melt the iron. The power company gave the foundry 20 minutes an hour but not necessarily any 20 minute that they wanted. We also connected up these huge capacitors banks to correct the power factor and that alone saved them something like close to 200 thousand a month in their 4 to 5 million dollar a month power bill. They stilll use the same system today and when we made those changes were during the raygun years. We made these change overs while they were using the machines and sometime on some of the lines it would take months to get all the switches etc mounted and conduit run and terminations made then during a holiday weekend we'd make the change over. Brain transplants is how we referred to them. for 12 years there I never got to take a holiday one off but I was being paid well for my time so I didn't bitch. Just to give you an idea as to the size of the projects on one of the lines we used close to a hundred thousand feet of wire just going from the old relay cabinet to the new process controller cabinets and the longest wire was about 20 ft. I never got so tired of terminating wires. I did all the terminations as the rest of the crew were running conduit, mounting switches and pulling wire. I'd be under a lot of pressure those weekends when we made the switch overs as I was the one who did all the connections. My paycheck would show that so I didn't mind Needless to say when that was all completed I went back to finishing concrete and finished out my work history doing that.