According to Myers, the mine used to spend an entire shift moving power a few years ago.
“Today at Emerald, we are currently able to move the power 700 to 800 feet and be producing coal within 2 hours.”
The main reason for this was the introduction of a monorail winch designed and supplied by Morgantown Machine and Hydraulics.
Previously the mine found it difficult to keep power up to the winches when power was being de-energized.
The solution was to design a winch powered from the mine’s 115 volt DC scoop batteries.
“This gave us a 20,000 pound capacity winch driven with a variable flow pump that would allow speeds from creep to more or less 50 foot a minute all packaged in a unit 12 foot long, 32 inches wide, and 42 inches in height,” Myers said.
An extra bit of ingenuity was introduced to move the winch itself, achieved by power from two 12 volt car batteries.
Emerald is owned by RAG and produces around 6 million tons clean coal per annum.
