Sustainable construction power for tower cranes: reducing fuel consumption and project emissions

Aggreko’s General Contractor customer is a leader on the road to sustainable construction practices. For this project, they needed a partner to help them solve the problem of maintaining enough power for a large tower crane while keeping costs and emissions in check. Their tower crane needed a generator with enough power to manage transient loads. Since the tower crane was only used during a few hours per day, their existing Tier 2 500kW diesel generator spent long periods sitting idle, running underloaded or – even worse – on negative loads. This generator was impacting project emissions targets and costs of operations were skyrocketing. That’s where Aggreko stepped in.

Aggreko’s expert engineers partnered up with our General Contractor customer to get to the root of the problem. They needed a solution that would let them harness power when they needed it, without the need to waste fuel by keeping an oversized generator running 24/7. Aggreko’s engineering and project teams came up with a solution: A hybrid power system with a smaller carbon and project footprint. Aggreko used one of our smaller, more sustainable 200kW Tier 4 genset to replace the existing, oversized generator. Our battery and energy storage systems (BESS) arrived on site ready to plug in and start saving energy. With the right batteries in place, our General Contractor customer could store unused energy for when they needed it – and cycle their genset off during periods of no load.

The pilot was placed on the same location with an identical tower crane onsite for a side-by-side comparison with excellent results. We saw a 50% reduction in run time which equated to a 46% reduction in fuel burned accompanied with an overall site emission reduction of 39%.