E-quipment highlight: 4,400 hp Wabtec FLXDrive electric locomotive

This is a story about mining trains, not home upgrades, but here's what happened. BHP, a mining company in Australia, has been running two battery-electric locomotives built by Wabtec at its Jimblebar iron ore mine for almost a year. Each locomotive has a 7 megawatt-hour battery pack (for scale, that's roughly 100 times the size of a typical home battery) and 4,400 horsepower, enough to haul up to 35,000 tonnes of ore. Instead of a diesel engine generating electricity like most freight trains, these run purely on battery power.

The interesting part is the braking. The locomotives use regenerative braking, which captures energy while going downhill loaded with ore and feeds it back into the battery, similar to how an electric car recovers energy when you take your foot off the gas. On the right terrain, this braking can generate enough power to send the empty train back uphill for another load, meaning the battery might only need charging once, if ever, for a given route.

BHP announced plans to add two more Wabtec locomotives, plus two from a different manufacturer, Progress Rail, arriving in 2027, so it can compare battery-electric locomotive technology from two companies side by side at the same site.

None of this involves home equipment or rebates. It's a look at how battery and regenerative-braking technology, similar in principle to what shows up in electric cars and some home battery systems, is scaling up to heavy industrial use.