The first fully electric wheel loader in New Zealand fitted with log forks has passed 3,700 operating hours at PermaPine’s treatment site outside Taupō, working the log yard, the treatment plant, and the wider yard at the country’s largest maker of posts and poles. That is according to Ian Potter, PermaPine’s Operations Manager, who called the Volvo L120 Electric responsive, comfortable, and effortless, based on trial results published by Volvo CE last month.
“Moving around the site is effortless, no matter the ground conditions,” Potter said of a loader his team refused to park on light duties, sending it across the site instead to test its full capability. PermaPine runs that operation 24 hours a day across 100 acres, peeling up to 11,000 metres of timber daily and steaming and treating up to 11,000 cubic metres a month.
Heavy electric loaders have worked New Zealand sites before, with Wellington’s Southern Landfill cutting 25,000 litres of diesel a year from a 20-tonne electric machine bought in 2023, but none had carried timber on log forks in a full-time production environment until the Taupō trial. Hard use was the point, with PermaPine setting out to learn whether its electric equipment could meet both its sustainability goals and the demands of full-scale production.
Unveiled at Volvo Days in September 2024, the L120 Electric is a 20-tonne machine lifting six tonnes, powered by a 282kWh lithium-ion battery, which Volvo rates for five to nine hours of work on a single charge and for 30 per cent lower maintenance than its diesel equivalent.
Getting power to the loader took a government partner, with EECA, New Zealand’s energy efficiency agency, behind the chargers PermaPine installed, support that leaves the site ready to add more electric machines. Leasing brought the machine in through the Volvo dealer TDX, on terms Potter said suited the company’s cash flow and shared the risk of the high capital cost.
“The feedback has been fantastic, and everything is working well,” Ewen Satherley, Territory Sales Manager and Forestry Specialist at TDX, said of a customer who already runs 20 Volvo wheel loaders and three Volvo excavators across the operation. Diesel is not the first fuel PermaPine has used; a biomass boiler already burns timber residues to generate steam that dries its products and locks the preservative into the wood.
It comes as Fulton Hogan, one of Australia and New Zealand’s largest infrastructure contractors, is committed to using the same machine for five years under the rent-to-rent model, renting electric machines without the capital cost of owning them. “From forestry to construction, the versatility is there,” Bertrand Collette, Volvo CE’s Head of Site Solutions Oceania, said of customers he claims are using the machines in ways well beyond initial expectations.
Sweden is running the same test at sawmill scale, with the L120 Electric working day and night through winter at Fiskarheden, one of the country’s largest sawmills, where 30 operators keep the loader on sawdust and wood chips between top-ups from a mobile charger.
“So far it’s been working well, very well, actually,” Fredrik Grönberg, Fiskarheden’s maintenance manager, said of a trial pushing electric machines deeper into a forest supply chain that put the world’s first fully electric timber truck to work in 2024.
