Miller Technology in North Bay is celebrating.
The local business has been testing Battery Electric Vehicles (BEV) at mine sites for the past year and now has its first BEV land cruiser mine sale.
It was purchased by Young Davidson mine of Alamos Gold.
Hugh McDermid, VP Operations, says it’s the first of more to come.
“We’re building stock, as it stands right now, with demand we’re definitely ramping up for increased production for the rest of 2022, into 2023 and onwards,” he says. “Lots more to come from us in terms of electric vehicles and platforms, new designs and developments.”
McDermid notes they’re also doing work around hydrogen fuel cells too.
He says they build infrastructure support vehicles for underground mining applications and have become a world leader in battery electric utility vehicles for mining.
“They are some of the first of their kind to be fully electric in our endeavour to reduce carbon emissions in the mining field. We’re quite excited with the development of our Ionic Drive platform,” McDermid adds.
He says it’s a scalable and adaptable electric vehicle system that can be tailored to suit any number of pieces of equipment underground.
They also have a ground-up new build called the Relay and a conversion kit to convert a diesel Toyota Land Cruiser into a battery electric vehicle.
The plan is to expand into the forestry sector and airports.
“We’re branching out into those fields just because we feel that the duty cycle that those pieces of equipment require is similar to mining,” McDermid says. “We think it would be a nice way to complement the technology and all the work we’ve done here at Miller to propagate our technology into other industries.”
He says they’ve been on a significant growth trajectory for the past five years and their growth forecast for the future is quite aggressive.
“We’re hoping to expand and continue the expansion of our employee base and product line,” he says.
McDermid says they’re thankful for their dedicated employees and Alamos Gold for joining them on their “path to electrification”.