Total Cost of Owning an Electric Construction Machine: the Method

What are the six cost lines on an electric machine?

Every hour the machine works, it spends money in six places. Write them down in this order, because the order is also the order of difficulty.

Energy is the units of electricity it draws, multiplied by what you really pay for a unit. Upkeep is servicing and wear parts. Battery provision is money you set aside now for a pack you will replace later. Downtime is the earning you lose when the machine stands still. Resale is the value the machine loses while you own it. Finance is the interest you pay the lender.

Four of those six are fixed amounts for the year. Only energy and downtime move with how much work you do. That matters more than anything else on this page, and the section on annual hours explains why.

Two of the six may not apply to your machine at all. A machine fed by a cable has no battery to replace. A machine bought outright has no interest to pay. Settle those two questions before you start adding.

How many units does an electric excavator draw in an hour?

Units drawn per hour are the machine’s rated motor power in kW, multiplied by your load factor. A unit is one kilowatt-hour (kWh), the same thing your electricity bill counts. Load factor is the share of the motor’s full power the machine actually uses across a working hour, written as a decimal: 0.5 means it averages half its rated power.

Rated motor power you can read today, without talking to anybody. It is printed on the machine’s specification like engine power on a diesel. Across the thirteen electric excavators listed in India it runs from 16.5 kW (21.1 HP) on the LiuGong 9027FE EV to 400 kW (536 HP) on the BEML BE1000E-1, with the BEML BE1800E carrying two motors of 300 kW each. That is a span of roughly twenty-four times, which is why a borrowed “units per hour” figure from any article, including a maker’s, tells you nothing about your machine.

Load factor is the honest part. Nobody can give it to you, because it is a description of your work and not of the machine. Digging a trench in soft soil all day is a light duty; loading rock into tippers without a pause is a heavy one. Three ways to get a usable figure, in order of how much you can trust them:

• Read it off the machine. Electric machines meter their own energy use, so a week on your own site gives you units per hour directly and the load factor drops out of the sum altogether.
• Failing that, read the meter at the charging point for a week and divide those units by the hours the hour meter clocked in the same week.
• Until you have either, assume something between 0.4 and 0.7 and run the arithmetic twice, at the low end and at the high end. A cost you have bracketed beats a cost you have guessed once.

Rated power is a ceiling, not an average. A machine that never draws more than half its rated power still has to be fed from a connection sized for the full figure, which is where the next section starts to bite. How the connection and the charger are sized is covered in our guide to charging an electric excavator on site.

What do you really pay for a unit of electricity?

Not the rate in the headline. An industrial electricity bill has three separate heads, and only one of them is charged on the units you consume. Taking the Maharashtra schedule as the worked case, the Maharashtra Electricity Regulatory Commission’s order of 25 June 2025 in Case No. 75 of 2025 sets out low-tension tariffs under three columns: a Fixed or Demand Charge, an Energy Charge, and a Wheeling Charge, the last being what you pay for the use of the wires.

Two things in that structure decide what a machine costs you, and both are about where your connection sits relative to 20 kW.

Table 1: the three heads of a low-tension industrial bill, and how the basis changes at 20 kW

The first row is the one owners miss. Below 20 kW the fixed charge is a flat monthly amount and a charger adds nothing to it. Above 20 kW it is billed on each kVA of sanctioned demand, so raising your sanctioned load to feed a machine charger raises the fixed part of your bill every month, in months when the machine never turns a wheel. Size the connection for the charging you need and not for the charging you might one day want.

The second and third rows change the meaning of a unit. kWh is the energy you used. kVAh includes the reactive part of the load as well, so a connection with a poor power factor is billed for more kVAh than the kWh it did useful work with. Power factor is the ratio between the two. Above 20 kW it stops being an electrical nicety and becomes a line on your bill.

So the figure to put in the arithmetic is not a rate from any schedule. It is your own effective rate, and there is one way to get it:

Effective rate per unit = the total of last month’s bill, divided by the units billed on it.

Total means total: energy, fixed or demand charge, wheeling, electricity duty and any surcharge. Do it over three bills and take the highest. Every state has its own schedule and its own category definitions, so read yours rather than borrowing Maharashtra’s, and check which category a construction site or a yard falls into before you assume the industrial rate applies to you.

Does your machine even have a battery line?

This is the fork in the whole method, and on more than half the electric excavators listed in India today the answer is no. A battery machine carries its energy and you will one day pay to replace the pack. A mains or cable machine is plugged into the grid through a trailing cable and a transformer: there is no pack, no provision, and no charging window, but the connection, the cable and the demand charge become yours to pay for.

Here is what the thirteen listed machines say about themselves, as of October 2026.

Table 2: how each listed electric excavator is fed, from its own specification

Three state a battery, seven point to a mains or cable feed, and three do not say. On the four mains machines in that middle group the reading is ours and not the maker’s: a motor given one rated speed near 1,500 rpm is being fed 50 Hz mains, because that is the speed 50 Hz produces. Where the specification does not say, that is your first question to the dealer, and the answer changes which lines you add up. The full comparison of battery against cable and against diesel is in our guide to electric vs diesel construction machines, and the current line-up is listed under electric excavators.

How do you turn upkeep, the battery and downtime into a per-hour figure?

All three are annual amounts, and all three become hourly amounts the same way: divide by the hours the machine will work in a year.

For upkeep, ask the dealer for the annual service contract in writing and add your own estimate of wear parts. On an electric machine the engine items go: no engine oil and filters, no fuel filters, no diesel exhaust fluid. What arrives instead is high-voltage inspection on a schedule the dealer sets, coolant for the motor and the power electronics, and the same tracks, tyres, bucket teeth and hydraulic oil as before. Do not enter zero for servicing because the engine has gone. Enter the quoted contract.

For the battery, the provision is the quoted price of a replacement pack divided by the pack life the warranty actually promises, in hours. Both halves must come from the warranty document, not from a conversation, and the document should say what capacity the pack is guaranteed to still hold at the end and who pays for the labour. Our electric machine buying checklist sets out the warranty wording to insist on. On a mains or cable machine this line is zero.

For downtime, estimate the hours the machine will stand still in a year waiting for a part or an engineer, and multiply by what an hour of its work earns you. A machine with one trained service engineer four districts away is a different number from one with a dealer in town, and the honest way to size it is to ask how far the nearest trained engineer is before you sign.

What about resale and the loan?

These are the two lines owners leave out, and on a five-year view they are usually larger than the electricity.

The resale provision is the purchase price minus what you think the machine will fetch when you sell it, divided by the hours you will work it before then. On a diesel excavator there is a second-hand market to price that against. On an electric machine in India there is almost none yet, so the resale figure is an assumption rather than a reading, and the safe way to carry it is to assume a low resale and be pleased later. This is the one line on the page that no method can make reliable, and saying so is more useful than printing a percentage.

The finance line is the total interest over the life of the loan, divided by the hours you will work over the same period. Not the monthly instalment: the instalment includes the money you borrowed, which the resale line is already handling, so counting it twice overstates the cost. Ask the lender for the total interest payable on the sanction letter and divide. If you are comparing what the monthly outgo does to your cash flow rather than what the machine costs per hour, that is a different question, and equipment finance options is the place to work it out.

How many hours a year will the machine really work?

This is the number that decides the answer, and it is the one owners put in last and guess hardest. Four of the six cost lines are fixed rupees for the year, so the hours you divide them by set the cost per hour almost on their own.

Take an assumed ₹6,00,000 a year of fixed cost, the upkeep contract plus the battery provision plus finance, and divide it by four different working years. The method is one division; the result is the whole decision.

Figure 1: the same ₹6,00,000 of fixed cost, spread over four different working years (our arithmetic on an assumed figure)

The machine is identical in all four rows. Only the work is different, and the cost per hour moves by four times. An electric machine is bought at a premium and paid back out of cheaper energy, so it needs hours to pay that premium back. A machine that works 600 hours a year will not get there on any tariff.

Use real hours, not a target. Last year’s hour meter reading on the machine it replaces is the best number you have. Buying your first machine, take the days you honestly expect to be on hire, multiply by the hours a day you expect to run, and cut the answer by a fifth for monsoon, breakdowns and waiting for payment.

A worked example, start to finish

Every number in this section is invented to show the method. None of it is a price, a quotation, or a figure from any machine listed on this site. Put your own numbers through the same eight rows.

The example is a 20-tonne class battery excavator, assumed to work 1,500 hours a year and to be kept five years, bought on a loan.

Table 3: the method, with assumed numbers (an example, not a quote)

Read the shape of that answer rather than the answer itself. Energy is ₹523 of ₹1,763, under a third of the total. The resale provision alone is larger, and it is the line nobody can verify. So an electric machine is not decided by the tariff, and a page that compares only the energy line has answered a quarter of the question.

Now change one thing at a time. Drop the hours from 1,500 to 800 and the four fixed lines inflate while energy stays where it is. Put the same machine on a cable instead of a battery and the ₹180 battery line goes to zero, while a connection charge you have to size yourself arrives in its place. Raise the load factor from 0.55 to 0.7 and energy climbs by about ₹143 an hour. The method is useful precisely because it shows you which lever is worth pulling.

Where does this arithmetic favour an electric machine?

Run the method on enough jobs and a pattern comes out. Electric construction machine ownership is not decided by the machine being electric. It comes down to hours, and to whether you have a grid connection worth the name.

Table 4: what the arithmetic rewards, and what it punishes

Everything in the right-hand column is a number you can put a figure on, except the last. Resale is the one that cannot be priced yet, which is why the method ends with an assumption rather than an answer, and why this is a decision worth revisiting every year rather than settling once. The machines themselves, and what each one is built to do, are covered in our round-up of the most advanced electric excavators, and the wider pillar sits at our guide to electric construction machines.

If the machine you are costing is a diesel, the same eight rows apply with fuel in place of units and no battery line, and that version is worked through in excavator cost per hour. Compare live electric excavator models and ask a dealer for the two figures this method cannot get you: the replacement pack price and the warranted pack life in hours.

Prices, specifications and features are indicative, vary by variant, location and date, and should always be confirmed with the official OEM or authorised dealer before any purchase decision. DesiMachines is not liable for decisions taken on the basis of information that may have changed after publication.