Out of Xanax. Tossing and turning at 3am because the universe hates me. So I crawl onto Cummins.com like a junkie chasing one last hit. And what do these corporate necromancers drop after their little wank-break. Two fresh turds precision-engineered to bore you into a drooling coma, then quietly sell you another decade of planet-fucking diesel wrapped in a green ribbon made from recycled lies.
First: Battery Energy Storage Systems. Again. The same beige comfort blanket they drag out like a priest waving the same dead saint’s relic every time reality starts smelling too much like smoke and broken promises. Second: a mining piece that admits the quiet part out loud. Internal combustion engines are not going anywhere. So let’s keep the iron beasts breathing longer, lock the customer onto the Cummins data teat, and call it smart optimisation while we drain their wallets and their will to live.
BESS Is Cummins’ Emotional Support Corpse
BESS has evolved from corporate buzzword into full-blown emotional support cadaver.
Whenever the air gets too smoky and the green investors start asking awkward questions, out rolls the battery gospel: resilience, flexibility, renewable penetration, the grid “transitioning”. Always in that hushed soothing tone, like a hospice nurse holding your hand while she jacks up the morphine drip and quietly empties your wallet into her offshore account.
This time they give you the full scales tour. Residential. Commercial. Community. Utility. Grid. Off-grid. A corporate bedtime story for the damned where every page ends with “BESS is critical” and you wake up with drool on your chin, a new capex line item, and the creeping suspicion you’ve been roofied by PowerPoint.
The Nameless Ghost Author Returns
Both pieces are credited to the usual faceless template: Cummins Inc, Global Power Technology Leader.
No human name. No accountability. Just a corporate poltergeist that can spew whatever contradictory horseshit it wants this week, flip the script next month, and vanish like a silent fart in a lift.
Brave claims get signed. Sales perfume gets ghost-written.
Buzzword Chloroform With Smug Cunt Energy
The battery piece opens by crowning BESS “arguably the most critical element” for a resilient flexible grid, then immediately swings at the professionals who actually keep the lights on: not always well understood even among grid operators.
Even among grid operators.
That level of ball-sack-stroking arrogance makes you want to grab a spanner and redecorate the next town hall slide deck with somebody’s teeth.
Then comes the familiar corporate word-salad enema: islanding, seamless transitions, voltage support, frequency support, power quality, peak shaving, demand charge reduction, congestion relief, T and D deferral, energy arbitrage, demand response, load management.
It reads like a procurement manager’s wet dream dressed up as education. Pharmaceutical-grade sedation.
Off-Grid Truth Leak: Diesel Still Does The Heavy Lifting
Here’s the black-comedy money shot. They cannot help but confess.
In the off-grid and remote section, Cummins admits renewables like solar and wind get “smoothed” when combined with more reliable diesel generation.
There it is.
Batteries get the halo and the Instagram filter. Diesel stays as the grim bastard doing the heavy lifting. Cummins plays both sides like the two-faced pusher it is.
They mumble that BESS helps reduce reliance on diesel fuel. Sure mate. And a breath mint reduces reliance on toothpaste while your breath still smells like death. Diesel remains the throbbing black heart of the operation. The battery is the polite green screen so nobody notices the money printer is still running on fossil blood.
And who do they name as off-grid use cases. Remote villages. Island communities. Mining operations.
How convenient. Because the very next day they drop the mining love letter.
Mining: Frankenstein’s Monster Gets An Extended Warranty
This one is pure necrophilia for heavy machinery. Uptime. Stability. ROI. Harsh conditions. Minimal downtime. All the romance of ripping the earth’s guts out with none of the blood, screaming, or environmental body count in the brochure.
They brag the QSK60 was originally rated for 12,000 hours under typical loads. Then they stretch it to 18,000 plus hours to overhaul through durability testing, component optimisation, and refined maintenance practices.
Fewer rebuilds. More uptime. Lower cost.
Translation: the same mine gets to keep chewing the planet for longer with the same roaring bastard of an engine at its core. Funny how “sustainable” always translates to keep the money printer running until the last shareholder is dead and the last tree is mulch.
PrevenTech: Hand Over The Keys, Peasant
Then comes the bit that should make every fleet manager’s sphincter slam shut like a bank vault.
PrevenTech is pitched as real-time monitoring, predictive analytics, and 24/7 support. Fine. Then they brag the platform uses proprietary datasets only interpretable by Cummins.
Only interpretable by Cummins.
That is not service. That is a digital ball-gag and a lifetime collar.
Your telemetry becomes theirs. Your maintenance schedule becomes their judgement. Your fleet health becomes their priesthood. You get cute alerts. They get to own your balls in software form and call it partnership while tightening the noose around your neck and your margin.
The Balanced Path Forward: Same Old Shit, Fresher Font
Then they wheel out the incremental decarbonisation buffet to make the corpse smell less like bullshit.
MCRS upgrades with fuel savings claims and particulate reductions. Calibrations that shave a few percent off fuel and CO2. Hybrid retrofits with tidy headline reductions. Dual-fuel ethanol and diesel pitched as a practical pathway. Drop-in fuels like HVO and biodiesel blends.
Lovely numbers. Cute charts. Calming language.
Then they drop the mask:
Internal combustion engines remain the foundation of powering mining.
So the “balanced path forward” is not a transition. It is palliative care for the dying planet while they keep the hospice bills coming. Sell the upgrades. Sell the contracts. Sell the rebuilds. Sell the monitoring. Sell the whole ecosystem of dependency. Slap decarbonisation on the slide deck, type it slower, and hope the reader falls asleep before noticing Cummins still has one hand on the BESS halo and the other wrapped around the diesel dick.
Knife-Edge Closer
Cummins wants you sedated. BESS for bedtime. Mining uptime for the morning. Green words as the blanket, diesel as the addiction.
If you are still awake after reading their stuff, you are either immune to boredom or you are already dead.
Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project