The electric fleet is here – but the mine must change with it

Battery electric vehicles (BEVs) are changing mining. But electrification success depends on sites adapting energy systems, operations and workforce models.

In brief

• Mine electrification is advancing, but success depends on adapting systems, processes and people, not just battery electric vehicle adoption.
• Reducing diesel use and emissions is the main driver for many operators, shifting focus from productivity to risk management and sustainability. 
• BEVs introduce new operational constraints in power, dust and energy management, requiring integrated planning for safe, reliable operations.

Underground reality check: ventilation savings depend on dust, not hope

Ventilation is often presented as electrification’s cleanest financial win. In principle, removing diesel exhaust should reduce airflow requirements. But field evidence shows why this cannot be assumed.

A field study conducted at a Canadian mid-tier gold operation tested diesel and battery electric load-haul-dump vehicles (LHDs) to compare performance and understand environmental factors driving ventilation requirements. The results were strikingly practical: in the scenarios tested, the BEV and diesel LHDs moved equivalent amounts of material in a similar time under representative duty cycles. BEVs can do the work.

The more important finding, however, is what constrained ventilation reductions. In the production environment tested, respirable crystalline silica concentrations became the driver for determining airflow requirements for the battery powered LHD. The study evaluated a scenario with approximately 50% reduced airflow versus the diesel baseline.¹ While there was potential for reduction, contaminant levels exceeded limits under the reduced airflow scenario at that site, meaning achievable savings were materially less than 50%.²

This is the key message for any operator building a BEV business case underground: electrification doesn’t eliminate ventilation design risk, it shifts it. The limiting factor may become dust and silica rather than diesel particulate and exhaust gases. If dust suppression and material handling controls are not strong, electrification alone will not deliver the ventilation dividend many plans quietly assume.

The fleet of the future is an operating system: energy, uptime and people

Important to note, BEVs change the “physics” of uptime. Diesel fleets are constrained by fuel logistics and mechanical maintenance; electric fleets add constraints around energy balance, charging strategy and duty cycle planning. Results from the aforementioned gold operation field study make this tangible. Energy demand varied meaningfully by grade and duty cycle, and regenerative braking materially affected energy captured on downhill segments. To maintain availability, the site relied on battery swapping (charging one battery while the LHD operated on another), highlighting that infrastructure design is inseparable from equipment productivity.

At the industry level, operators already anticipate that people systems must adapt. EY Canada’s benchmarking respondents largely expect training effort for BEV operation and maintenance to be about the same (60%) or higher (40%) than current fleets and maintenance cost to be about the same (80%) or higher (20%), in contrast to the sweeping reductions sometimes promised in simplified narratives. Open responses also reinforce uneven readiness: some sites have operator and maintenance teams trained by OEMs, while others report no specific workforce training plan yet.

This is where the future of electrified fleets will be won or lost. Not in the procurement cycle, but in the program layer: how companies standardize training, redesign maintenance routines, update emergency response for high voltage systems, and build the data capability to manage charging, downtime and performance.

Execution will decide the electric mine

The future of electrified vehicle fleets in Canadian mining won’t be determined by whether BEVs work in principle. They already do. It will be determined by whether mines can convert electrification into a reliable operating model: ventilation plans that reflect dust and silica realities, energy systems designed around real duty cycles and workforce programs that make high voltage equipment safe and maintainable at scale. 

The most successful operators will treat fleet electrification not as a vehicle swap but as a site transformation program, because that’s what it is.