Perkins on the energy transition: “a mixture of everything”

The 904J-E28T diesel engine from Perkins (photo: Perkins)

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As a company which has been building engines for nearly a century, the history of Perkins has been inextricably bound with that of the diesel engine.

But, with industry coming under increasing pressure to find alternative fuels or power technologies, the Caterpillar-owned engine manufacturer - a venerable name in the business - is on its own mission to come up with a reduced carbon future.

IRN: How would you describe the Perkins approach to the energy transition? Will the company being fully electric in 10 years’ time? 

Corey Berry: I think it will be a mixture of everything. We’ve positioned ourselves to be flexible and looking at all the different technologies that could be used.

I don’t think there’s going to be a one-size-fits-all solution across territories, across applications and across customer types.

IRN: How is Perkins adapting its smaller engines to address demand for environmentally friendly solutions?

CB: The company’s stance is to be adaptive, to be a partner to our OEMs and to the rental industry so they are ready to meet the needs of their customers, and to help them be successful.

So that means a lot of different things. For us, we have our ear to the ground with our teams that lead those initiatives into the energy transition, and we see it as not one solution, but possibly many solutions across different territories, different applications, and different customer types.

So, I think for us it’s just being nimble enough to be adaptive to have solutions when and where they’re needed.

IRN: Are you looking at HVO, biodiesel, or any of those types of alternatives?

Corey Berry, global rental sales manager, Perkins

CB: All our engines, including our higher regulated engines for Tier 4 and Stage V for Europe, can run on HVO and alternative fuel.

IRN: Does Perkins take a different approach to the energy transition in the US than it does in Europe?

CB: It’s done very much by the opportunity and the customer. Our goal is to partner with an OEM or even a rental company and truly understand their needs and take that back to see how we can adapt our products—existing, new, or maybe future products—to meet their needs.

There’s no one-size-fits-all; whether it’s Europe or the US, it’s really just taking a look and understanding what our customer needs and building solutions for them.

What I see is so many different options and different needs depending on who, what, and when.

IRN: Are rental customers in North America investing in new technologies?

CB: I see it as early days. We see the traditional combustion engine still at the forefront in most of the applications you can see on the show floor.

I think everybody is interested and excited for the alternative energy technologies. But what are they, where are they going to be, and who needs them?

I think it’s still up for debate or discussion. Again, going back to my earlier comment about being flexible and nimble in the terms of putting ourselves in a position to serve a customer when and where they need it, and it’s going to be different in parts of the US.

IRN: From the tech side, what are rental companies looking for?

CB: There are two things that break it up in what I see from rental companies and what they ask for and where we can help them.

The first is how they create a better experience for their customer in terms of utilisation and how they best manage their job sites when the machines are on rent and working where they need the machines. Number two is the maintenance side.

I think we fit in very well to both those in where we take the data and information, we can feed that back to them to help create that better experience for their customers in terms of uptime, load factors in the machines, and very detailed information on the engine.

But also back to the condition monitoring, where we can monitor the health or the series of events that happened with an engine to predict any kind of failures or best-use recommendations.

IRN: With regards to data capture, how are you using it to help rental companies manage their fleets?

CB: Rental companies are more sophisticated today than they’ve ever been. The large rental companies all the way down to the smaller local or regional rental companies are using technology and connectivity to better run their rental fleets.

So for us, condition monitoring is where we see that we fit in. We have the tools and the partnerships with other companies in the connectivity space to help monitor the condition of our engines and bring that into the ecosystems of the sophisticated systems that rental companies are using today.

Perkins 2606 12.9-litre six-cylinder engine will be launched in 2026 (Photo: Perkins)

That’s really our goal—how do we help our OEMs enhance the value of products when they have a Perkins engine, and how do we help the rental customer create the best experience for their customer?

We think that by partnering with OEMs, rental companies, and other connectivity devices, that’s where we can bring information in to help them, and condition monitoring is where we see we fit best.

IRN: Are you working on anything new?

CB: We’re continuously bringing tools and programmes to the rental company to help them create the best return on investment when they have a product with our engines in it, and that connects back to our distribution network for genuine parts and our service support.

Again, uptime is everything, so those are some things that we’re continuously honing and working on.