Volvo Construction Equipment (Volvo CE) is collaborating with the City of Stockholm, the construction company Skanska, the Volvo CE dealer Swecon and other like-minded partners in the ground-breaking urban development of Stockholm’s meat packing district.

The EC230 Electric, a new 23-tonne battery excavator from Volvo CE, will play a key role in the construction of the area with 3,000 homes and 14,000 workplaces – helping to build with the lowest possible greenhouse gas emissions.

The 100-year-old slaughterhouse area in central Stockholm in Sweden, also known as the meatpacking district, will become a test bed for innovation and emission-free construction equipment when work on the urban transformation begins. Construction is due to be completed in 2033 and when it is open to the public, it will provide 3,000 new homes and 14,000 jobs.

Sustainability has been built in from the start of the project with requirements for fossil-free contracts including transport to and from the construction site. With a particular requirement that at least one of the larger excavators working on site be electric, there was only one partner for the job: Volvo CE and its range of electrical construction equipment.

ABOVE: When completed, the site will provide 3,000 homes and 14,000 jobs

The new EC230 23-tonne electric excavator, offered in selected markets, has already proven its potential for a range of applications and is one of only a handful of medium-sized electric machines commercially available. Early next year, it will be commissioned in Stockholm, together with a mobile peak-shaving unit from Volvo CE, to help excavate 75,000 tonnes of rock and 96,000 tonnes of soil in the project’s first stage, for an estimated 2,700 working hours.

“Partnerships are how we can speed up our journey towards emission-free workplaces,” says Fredrik Tjernström, responsible for sales of electromobility solutions at Volvo CE. “We have powerful and reliable solutions like our EC230 Electric that provide all the benefits of electric equipment: zero exhaust emissions, near silence and more comfortable operation. But it is by collaborating with partners such as Skanska and the City of Stockholm, which is in line with our mission to build a better world, that we can really drive the transformation of our industry in a much more holistic way.”

Lisa Kroon, project manager at Skanska, added: “It is Sweden’s largest test bed in an urban environment for fossil-free contracting, where we will convert almost 35,000 machine hours to fossil-free. We want to challenge construction standards and find new innovations, and we do that in collaboration with, among others, Volvo CE.”

ABOVE: Lisa Kroon says: “We can challenge building standards and find new innovations through collaboration”

Insights from the use of the EC230 Electric will not only be instrumental in helping Volvo CE build the world we want to live in through our electric solutions – providing data on factors such as productivity, cost and scalability – but will also prove useful to others partners in their ongoing ambitions to reduce climate impact through their work.

Anders Österberg, deputy finance councilor and chairman of the exploitation committee in the city of Stockholm, says: “We want to drive the development of fossil-free contracts and we can do that by setting tender requirements in our procurements. In the contract, where large amounts of rock and soil are to be excavated, one of the requirements is that at least 10% of the machine hours must be powered by electricity.”

ABOVE: Operator Richard Sjöblom says that he would now choose to drive electricity over diesel

Richard Sjöblom, Excavator for Skanska, has received overwhelmingly positive feedback after driving the EC230 Electric, particularly regarding ease of charging and the machine’s performance when tested in various applications:

“If I had to choose between an electric or diesel machine in this size class, I would choose electric because there are so many advantages over a diesel machine. When the machine was delivered to the site, there were many skeptics who believed that the machine did not have the capacity to last all day, but they have all been proven wrong!”

Apart from the EC230 Electric, all other machines are required to run on HVO (hydrogenated vegetable oil) – a biofuel that reduces greenhouse gas emissions by up to 90%.