Liebherr will launch its first completely electrical portal slewing crane on the first day of TransRussia 2018, 17^th April at 3pm Moscow time.

Liebherr portal slewing cranes (LPS) are modelled on its LHM mobile harbour cranes (MHCs) from the slewing ring upwards. The lower part and undercarriage are different as they come on a portal frame, but they are a variant of its MHC “family.”

To date Liebherr has supplied diesel generator MHCs with or without its hybrid Pactronic hydraulic drive and/or cable reels so the cranes can be plugged into shore power where available on the berth, but retaining the ability, where rubber-tyred LHM type, to move around different berths as required. Up to now no cranes from the MHC family have been supplied with purely electric drive.

For one thing, that would restrict the cranes to berths where shore power is available and the crane would have no redundancy to fall back on the diesel genset if the shore power were unavailable.

However, to date all Liebherr LPS cranes run on rail-mounted portals, so they are specific to particular berths anyway. Liebherr is not revealing anything about the new, all-electric LPS crane before TransRussia, so WorldCargo News has no idea how big it is (420, 550, 600, or even 800), but we are assuming the portal is rail-mounted, although it could be rubber-tyred if it is a smaller crane (120, 180, 280?), as Gottwald (Konecranes Gottwald) has already shown with its Model 2 G HMK rubbertyred portal variant, most recently in Mombasa in 2017.

A number of port companies in Russia operate on narrow finger piers or quay aprons restricted by adjacency to stock piles or warehouses, and need portal cranes to allow rail wagons and trucks to pass underneath. Typically these piers were equipped with rail-mounted cranes and the Liebherr LPS is a modern, drop-in replacement as the portal width is configured to the existing rail centres.