Earth Hour 2023: SANY Accentuates Electrification Development, Promoting Hydrogen Roadmap to Build Green Future

The climate crisis has catalyzed the global transition to clean and new energy. Though electric vehicles are becoming mainstream, energy transformation is still bounded by environmentally unfriendly fossil fuels. To free itself from this dependency, SANY is paving new paths through scientific research.

Green and beyond: SANY’s hydrogen roadmap to power a clean future

SANY has set an ambitious goal to become China’s largest provider of integrated hydrogen solutions in five years and lead global industry transformation, and it is laying out a comprehensive hydrogen industry chain covering green production, storage, transportation and refueling equipment.

The group’s hydrogen energy subsidiary, SANY Hydrogen, will focus on elevating core technological innovation and achieving a closed supply chain across the entire industry ecosystem to support China’s 2030/2060 “Dual Carbon” goals.

In March, SANY Hydrogen signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Guangtai Hydrogen Energy for the first 2,000kg hydrogen refueling station in Shanghai, leveraging SANY’s technological strengths to supply Guangtai Hydrogen Energy’s logistics vehicle operation layout and hydrogen refueling energy demand.

The station plans to install three units of 35MPa dual-metering hydrogen dispensers with an average hydrogen refueling speed of 2kg/min. Upon completion, it will meet the hydrogen refueling demand of 300 logistic vehicles of different tonnages and support Guangtai Hydrogen Energy’s cold-chain logistics operations in the Yangtze River Delta region.

The explosion-proof level of the station will reach IICT4, with excelling safety measures including automatic control of the hydrogenation process, hydrogen leak detection, alarm and shutdown to ensure worry-free operation, especially with environments of a temperature span from -20 to 55 degrees Celsius.

In 2020, SANY rolled out the world’s first hydrogen fuel cell mixer truck and dump truck in its Lighthouse factory in Shaoyang, marking the group’s first step into the “era of hydrogen.” In 2022, SANY established the first integrated station of hydrogen production and hydrogenation in Hunan Province, and delivered the first batch of hydrogen fuel cell heavy trucks to the city of Yueyang.

Electrified highway: anchoring the future of heavy-load highway freight

China’s first electrified highway demonstration line, co-constructed by SANY, CRRC Zhuzhou Electric Locomotive Research Institute and Tsinghua University, was recently completed in Zhuzhou, Hunan Province. The milestone project opens up a new path for heavy-load highway freight.

SANY has designed, developed and manufactured the vehicles as well as the core systems, owning full intellectual property rights.

The demonstration line is two-way and two-lane with 7-meter road width, it has set up 53 pillars and one box-type substation to support the 1.8-kilometer contact grid. The electrified highway provides a wide range of road condition scenarios for testing vehicle performance, including ramps, bumpy, waded and drenched roads.

With an overhead contact network similar to rail transit, the electrified highway is directly powered by the grid above to realize “charging while driving.” Compared to pure electric heavy trucks that run on power batteries, the new vehicle can prevent low temperature effects while increasing energy efficiency by 6 percent.

As Earth Hour brings attention to climate change, SANY is committed to addressing these challenges with concrete actions and pushing forward the development of its hydrogen energy portfolio to build a greener future for the planet.