without question, we can scale electric power to run any level of horsepower demand and keep it conveniently sized. It all falls apart over storage arrangements. all that heavy machinery still has to operate through a full shift with out ever running out of power.
as this makes clear ,the whole plan is actually years away. We have made amazing progress since the year 2000. We may have what we want by 2050 assuming it is possible. And i think it is.
It is still difficult.
The Bubble Pops: Big Miner BHP quietly backs away from decarbonization
By Jo Nova
https://joannenova.com.au/2026/05/the-bubble-pops-big-miner-bhp-quietly-backs-away-from-decarbonization/
The ABC and the Guardian think they are onto some hot scandalous leak, but they don’t seem to realize the awful truth they are accidentally revealing.
This is not the story of an evil miner failing to make commitments, it’s the story of their technology fantasy busting. If wind and solar power were cheap, the profit hungry miners would be doing it wouldn’t they?
Instead all their ambitious plans are coming undone.
BHP is the largest mining company in the world, it has shareholder approval to spend millions on wind and solar projects and on the conversion to electric trucks. They also had an enthusiastic management and Net Zero targets, yet somehow the company has decided to drop or delay the wind and solar projects, and the low emissions processing plant too. It’s all been put in the deep freeze, delayed until 2031 before it even starts.
The truth is that the big electric haul trucks are not even close to being ready, and without the batteries to soak up the unreliable power, there was no point in spending a billion dollars on the wind and solar projects either yet.
Everything hinged on the electric trucks being ready but they weren’t:
World’s biggest miner BHP backtracks on climate action with key projects put on ice, leaked documents reveal
By Christopher Knaus and Adam Morton, The Guardian
In a statement, BHP said its progress towards net zero emissions was dependant on technological shifts in trucks, trains and bulldozers, which were not yet ready to be deployed.
“For example, no Australian mining operation is currently utilising critical 240-ton battery-electric haul trucks as the technology is not advanced enough to scale to an operational fleet,” a spokesperson said.
The company is trialling battery electric trucks…
“The technology simply does not exist:”
The Chamber of Minerals and Energy of Western Australia, an industry group, said the shift to electrified haulage was incredibly complex and required a whole-of-sector effort to pioneer technological change.
“There is currently no mining operation anywhere in the world with the scale, complexity and operating conditions of the Pilbara running a fully electrified haulage fleet, because the technology to do so simply does not exist,” said its chief executive, Aaron Morey.
The ABC make out that BHP is being deceptive, saying it would cut emissions, while “locking in fossil fuels” yet the ABC has been deceptively telling us that wind and solar was the cheapest form of energy, while pretending they are real journalists, and not bothering to find out the real cost, something ten thousand engineers could have told them.
In their news stories the ABC didn’t have the honesty to mention that the failure of the “urgent” BHP plans shows that wind and solar obviously weren’t cheaper or more useful than diesel.
Antamina copper mine in Peru.
BHP Antamina copper mine in Peru.
BHP put in a sincere effort, but the ABC was deceptive all along
The only thing that the ABC “caught” BHP doing was plotting how to manage the reputational hit from making realistic business decisions. In a normal world they shouldn’t need to do that. But when the media-commentariat is fixated with trying to control the weather, then sensible companies make plans to put out those reputational fires. The fact that reporting is so irrational reflects badly on the ABC and The Guardian, not on BHP.
It doesn’t appear to have even crossed the minds of the ABC-Guardian team that their story puts renewable energy in a dismal light. They seem to believe that the higher costs are irrelevant and companies should spend the extra dollars out of charity for the planet, even though they’d be depriving their shareholders to do it. How about those ethics, eh?
The ABC reports that another thing that foiled the BHP plan was that diesel trucks got cheaper (the tragedy!):
Leaked documents expose how BHP shelved its ‘urgent’ plans to cut WA emissions
ABC News
They were working to a tight deadline — about 80 per cent of BHP’s Pilbara trucks were due to finish their operational life between 2024 and 2027.
A temporary fix was hit upon. BHP would overhaul its current fleet of diesel trucks to extend their life by a few years. This would buy the company time so it could start going electric in the late 2020s. But once again, the company had a change of heart. And once again, cost was a factor.
In 2023, diesel trucks from its main supplier Caterpillar suddenly became cheaper. The internal documents show rather than $5 million each, the price had fallen to $3 million.
So BHP went back on its plan. It purchased 62 new diesel trucks for its Jimblebar mine, locking in diesel use at one of its biggest mines until at least the late 2030s and potentially to 2041.
When diesel trucks became $2 million dollars cheaper each, should BHP have bought the expensive electric trucks anyway, and thus reduced their profits, providing less money for mums and dads superannuation accounts, and charged more for the ore, eventually depriving Mum and Dad of cheaper steel too?
The ABC reports on companies as if they are a failed wing of a government department, not a mass of independently organized people working together to serve millions of other people who willingly pay for these goods and services.
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