22 Piling and drilling rigs, for example, use between 30 and 80 litres of diesel per hour, sometimes even more than 100 litres under heavy drilling conditions. Hydraulic piling hammer rigs, which pound heavy concrete, steel or wooden piles deep into the ground, typically consume between 20 and 50 litres per hour. Once in operation, they run constantly – not just for the 20 minutes or so it takes to drive a pile, but also for the similar amount of time it takes to install the next pile in the machine. All the time, they are emitting CO2 into the local environment – at a rate of around one tonne per day for a large hydraulic hammer piling operation. Their electrification is being driven not just by the companies that use them but, in a large part, also by the localised emissions requirements effective in the places in which they operate. Stefan Mewes, product manager for pile driving equipment – construction machinery at Liebherr-Werk Nenzing in Austria, explains: “In Scandinavia – in Gothenburg or Stockholm – if they are looking for a job site, contractors are only allowed to have an electric machine on the job site. “If construction companies only have machines with diesel, they get no permissions – and there are a lot of cities like this. Munich, Berlin, Milan, even London, where it’s more restricted even for cars, companies need these machines otherwise they will not get permission to work inside the city. There’s also no smoke being emitted by them and a lot less noise, so there really is a big environmental advantage for a job site.” There is no single, one-size-fits-all electrification concept for every application in construction – each specific job has different limitations. A compact wheel loader in horticulture, for example, has different requirements to a 100 tonne crawler excavator for mining at 5000 m in remote locations. As a result, the first challenge when it comes to electrification is identifying the right competences for the right use-cases. In the case of a pile driver, the primary energy use is when it is doing its work role, rather than driving around the site. In fact, most of the time it barely moves at all. “Many piling points can be reached without any movement of the vehicle, so it just stands still a lot of the time,” explains Mewes. “There is an outreach of 8 m from the leader and it can lift or lower the leader 6 m. So, from one position of the carrier, it can reach 10 pile positions with no movement. “This is not a race track. We are sometimes changing position only five times a day – it’s a tiny amount. The machine comes to the site on a truck, so all we do is move it off the trailer and into position. We have a job site in Denmark, for example, where they are driving 10,000 concrete piles for the next 2–3 years – and in that period they will maybe drive around 5 km in total. That’s it!” It is similar for many machines in Liebherr’s range – and, as a result, they have actually been involved in electrification for decades – but only when plugged in. Grid-connected electric machines are an integral part of Liebherr’s portfolio, particularly in tower cranes, material handling machines or mining excavators, where machines are often deployed as semi-stationary equipment and a grid power connection is readily available. This has led their batteryelectric efforts to focus more on their smaller, more mobile vehicles – but since 2019, the larger machines, from piling machines to mining trucks, have been given a chance to become ‘unplugged’. “Everything happened pretty fast,” recalls Mewes. “Liebherr launched the LB 16 unplugged drilling rig at a construction show in 2019 and it was on its first job site only a few weeks later. It took about one year to go from concept to reality. The Liebherr Group always like to be a leader in technology, pushing borders, pushing development, and we Dossier | Liebherr piling machines July/August 2026 | E-Mobility Engineering Piling machines use large amounts of power to lift and accelerate a large weight to hammer piles into the ground The first challenge when it comes to electrification is identifying the right competences for the right use-cases
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