This is not the story of an evil miner failing to make commitments, it's the story of their technology fantasy busting. If wind and solar power were cheap, the profit hungry miners would be doing it wouldn't they?

Instead all their ambitious plans are coming undone.

BHP is the largest mining company in the world, it has shareholder approval to spend millions on wind and solar projects and on the conversion to electric trucks. They also had an enthusiastic management and Net Zero targets, yet somehow the company has decided to drop or delay the wind and solar projects, and the low emissions processing plant too. It's all been put in the deep freeze, delayed until 2031 before it even starts.

The truth is that the big electric haul trucks are not even close to being ready, and without the batteries to soak up the unreliable power, there was no point in spending a billion dollars on the wind and solar projects either yet.

Everything hinged on the electric trucks being ready but they weren't:

World's biggest miner BHP backtracks on climate action with key projects put on ice, leaked documents reveal

By Christopher Knaus and Adam Morton, The Guardian

In a statement, BHP said its progress towards net zero emissions was dependant on technological shifts in trucks, trains and bulldozers, which were not yet ready to be deployed.

"For example, no Australian mining operation is currently utilising critical 240-ton battery-electric haul trucks as the technology is not advanced enough to scale to an operational fleet," a spokesperson said.

The company is trialling battery electric trucks…

"The technology simply does not exist:"

The Chamber of Minerals and Energy of Western Australia, an industry group, said the shift to electrified haulage was incredibly complex and required a whole-of-sector effort to pioneer technological change.

"There is currently no mining operation anywhere in the world with the scale, complexity and operating conditions of the Pilbara running a fully electrified haulage fleet, because the technology to do so simply does not exist," said its chief executive, Aaron Morey.