3 ms·

One of the problems is having enough safety margin for energy storage. When a car runs out of power there is a shoulder to cry on nearby. With a ship adrift thi

• Robotbeat 9y ago
  With a ferry, you have a short route and a need for a fast recharge time. For longevity reasons, then, it is better to therefore use at least double the battery capacity as you think you need for a nominal trip and only use the middle capacity of the battery. That does two things: 1) Increases the life of the battery non-linearly. If you use half of the battery capacity in this way, your cycle life doesn't merely double. It may triple or quadruple. That saves a lot over the long run. In fact, if you're doing (say) 10 charge cycles a day, you might want to install an even larger than double capacity battery. 2) It means that you always have a very large emergency reserve. Slow speed also increases efficiency. Those two combined provide a very healthy margin.
• Broken_Hippo 9y ago
  One of the great things is that the world has already dealt with this problem much the same way we've dealt with cars breaking down on the road and trains breaking down on the tracks: We can tow them away. In addition, it doesn't seem like a large hurdle to design ships designed to recharge another ship's battery similar to how we can design refueling ships.