11 ms·

A new design ship in the Philippines is partly powered by wave energy

215 points by awk 6y ago

messo 6y ago
> The emissions from travel it took to report this story were 0kg CO2. The digital emissions from this story are an estimated 1.2g to 3.6g CO2 per page view. Maybe this is what finally could push companies towards making lighter and more efficient websites? At least an estimate of a webpages watt usage (server and client side).
- mehrdadn 6y ago
  > The digital emissions from this story are an estimated 1.2g to 3.6g CO2 per page view. Holy cow, that is a lot. 1-3 grams of CO2 per single load of a page? Makes me feel guilty about even clicking the article.
  - dtech 6y ago
    That is not a lot. it's about 4mWh for coal power. In comparison, leaving a 300W computer setup on for 10 hours each day with coal power is 3KWh or 2.5kg of CO2.
    - akiselev 6y ago
      So it takes the computing power equivalent of a 300W PC running for 10 hours to serve a thousand page views? At 50 req/page view, that server is handling ~1.5 requests per second. That kind of throughput can be handled by a RaspberryPi, so are we seriously wasting 95%+ of the power budget routing packets and idling servers?
      - ben_w 6y ago
        A million, not a thousand. Milliwatt-hours to kilowatt-hours.
  - baaym 6y ago
    When I reached the bottom of the page it even loaded an extra article. Now that's a real waste of CO2.
  - abbe98 6y ago
    Sending a short email is estimated to release 4g CO2: https://phys.org/news/2015-11-carbon-footprint-email.html https://phys.org/news/2015-11-carbon-footprint-email.html
  - pjc50 6y ago
    The average human breathes out 1g of CO2 every minute and a half. By comparison, average UK cars put out 124.5g for every km driven. It's not nothing, but it's not a lot either. It probably is worth evaluating the electrical efficiency of the tech industry as a whole, both in terms of highly executed code hotspots and entire pieces of business of questionable utility (ad javascript, cryptocurrency proof-of-waste), but individual web pages are the plastic straws of the industry compared to the giant flare stacks of real problems.
    - maelito 6y ago
      Ads and all the services that make a modern Web page should be included in the estimation.
    - aembleton 6y ago
      It's the equivalent of driving 19 metres in an average UK car. That's not far, but that is for a single web page. That seems incredibly high to me.
    - reportgunner 6y ago
      What is the comparison of the number of cars in the world versus the number of people in the world ?
      - pjc50 6y ago
        Estimates of vehicles in use (including commercial) seem to be about 1.2 billion. But the relevant number is surely total miles driven?
  - sephamorr 6y ago
    I'm having a very hard time rationalizing these numbers. Something has to have some very poor assumptions: Let's assume each page load is ~1mbit, and it's being served from 1000km away. 1mbit may be low, but most of it will presumably be content delivered by a CDN which is far closer than 1000km. The reference design (which I work on) for 400G DWDM systems are ~100W for 2 transceivers + EDFA + switches, for a standard 80km link. Assuming we hop every 80km (which should be conservative here), we get 3mJ for the energy through the network. The previous generation is probably 10x worse, so ~30mJ. Let's add the endpoint too; Wifi router + cable modem (12W or rather 3W marginal power since it's running anyway/ 200mbit) = 15mJ And finally for the server. I'd hope the server could do 1k requests per second, and that should amortize against backends, etc (2k RPS, but frontend + DB backend server, maybe), maybe 150W for the server, so 150mJ. This gives us 200mJ for a page load. Using California's current (1:28am) emissions for power generation of 0.274 mT/MWh (it's 1/3rd of this during the day), this yields 15ug/request. Where do the remaining 5 orders of magnitude come from? What am I missing? If TCO/production energy of the server was included, that couldn't more than double it (capex in a datacenter < opex, and if 100% of the server cost was for energy, we could double, but this is wildly conservative)
    - barbegal 6y ago
      Here is the methodology https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200131-why-and-how-does-future-planet-count-carbon https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200131-why-and-how-does... I think most of it comes from your client device. Your laptop may be using 50W of power or about 20g of CO2 per hour so reading the article for 6 minutes is ~2g of CO2.
      - maelito 6y ago
        In case someone wants to do the math again : 50W for 1 hour : 50Wh or 0.050kWh California : 187gCO₂eq/kWh according to https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/US-CAL-CISO https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/US-CAL-CISO -> 9.35gCO₂eq/h -> 0.16g/min -> 0.935g for 6 minutes
        sephamorr 6y ago
  - wiz21c 6y ago
    Just watching a movie about CO2 emissions is order of magnitudes above.
- manveru 6y ago
  I recently saw another site that tries to offset its carbon footprint: https://mynoise.net/carbonFootprintCompensation.php https://mynoise.net/carbonFootprintCompensation.php I hope this becomes more prevalent at least for paid services.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
  Not the whole story. The link provides more details (https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200131-why-and-how-does-future-planet-count-carbon https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200131-why-and-how-does...) It involves counting carbon from journalists' travel etc. So a full tally (which is good but isn't just about literal pages loaded) I also wonder how much JS + adverts have to offer as part of that carbon load.
- perfunctory 6y ago
  Why on earth would it finally push companies to do anything? Where is the profit motive in this? I am not against lighter websites. But it's not gonna happen unless we start pricing carbon.
- maelito 6y ago
  We need an open source model for estimating the CO2 emissions of a server, of the network (including CDNs, etc.), of a device.
- reportgunner 6y ago
  I was also disappointed with the amount of text compared to the amount of information in the article. It seemed like every paragraph started with for sure you have been in the waves so you know they are waves
  - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
    Agreed, far too much waffle. The first three paragraphs don't even mention the new ship design.
- jonshariat 6y ago
  I remember writing a paper in college about what the environmental impact of a web page was. One of the biggest energy savings Identified by far was changing the color of your website to use dark backgrounds.
aussieguy1234 6y ago
I've been in one of the traditional Philippines boats on a trip to an island in not so calm seas, we hired the boat and crew for the day. It was an interesting but scary experience, probably won't be doing it again. The island was decent.
bigbluedots 6y ago
Aren't all ships partly powered by wave energy if they're facing the right way?
- Xylakant 6y ago
  No, generally speaking, waves pass underneath a floating object in practically all circumstances. You may feel like there’s a forward surge when a wave comes in from behind, but all forward momentum gained while sliding down the wave is lost once the wave peak has overtaken you and you’re climbing back up the wave. Basically, waves will induce a circular motion on a floating object. There’s ways to trick and gain forward speed from waves, by basically picking a wave that’s high enough and continually sliding down on the front - Surfers for example. But that only works if your object is substantially smaller than the wave in question - which is sort of impossible for ships.
  - bigbluedots 6y ago
    Thank you for such a thoughtful response.
  - julosflb 6y ago
    Second order wave effects can cause drifting also.
  - michael1999 6y ago
    Nice explanation. A boat can start surfing once the waterline fits on one face of a wave, so <1/2 wavelength. So a 70m tug just needs a 200m long wave. Mind you, those waves could be 30m tall and breaking over you :-O. So not impossible, but I'm not eager to try it. https://www.passagemaker.com/lifestyle/freaks-of-nature-rogue-waves https://www.passagemaker.com/lifestyle/freaks-of-nature-rogu... The wave-glider is much more practical. https://www.liquid-robotics.com/wave-glider/how-it-works/ https://www.liquid-robotics.com/wave-glider/how-it-works/
peteretep 6y ago
Renewable energy to power boats?! It’ll never catch on
duxup 6y ago
When I see a wave foil I wonder how that doesn't make more drag than power...is this similar or something different?
- pjc50 6y ago
  What sort of wave foil do you mean? It's not clear from this article how the trimaran works, but you can see in the photos that there is a gap at the top of the outboard hulls. So I suspect it's the relative motion between the outboard hulls and the inboard one which is converted to hydraulic power - makes sense, it will be a short movement with a huge force behind it. That is then fed to a generator, electrical storage and propulsion unit.
  - duxup 6y ago
    Most seem to involve a wing or fin extending out from the hull in some way. That seems like it would introduce drag and greatly limit speed.
    - pjc50 6y ago
      Oh this kind of thing? https://wavefoil.com/ https://wavefoil.com/ I'm assuming they've tested it and it's not entirely fraudulen and does in fact give more speed than drag?
      - duxup 6y ago
        I'm not really sure the existence of a thing really indicates efficiency or usefulness, that's not a high bar.
    - jasonwatkinspdx 6y ago
      Hydrofoils have a very high lift drag ratio. You also have to remember the wetted area of the hull produces significant drag too. Lifting most or all of the hull out out of the water can enable dramatically higher speeds, at the cost of stability and complexity. The biggest America's Cup catamarans were roughly the scale of a 7 story apartment building, but were capable of lifting their entire mass on a foil the size of an ironing board. Because of the density of water, foils can generate a lot of force as lift.
jgilias 6y ago
It looks like there's nothing in the way to put something like one of those kite-sails meant for cargo ships on a ship like this one to reduce the fuel needs and hence the carbon footprint even more.
- AtlasBarfed 6y ago
  Add a retractable/foldout solar array for low seas and low wind, add solar capture to the sail fabric, add windmills for side/tailwind conditions too. Would probably need to be part of a hybrid powerplant though, but if you could get even 10-20% efficiency it might pay for itself in shipping where the boats are in service for a long time usually. Long range shipping, like air travel, is a major hole in low-carbon strategies right now. Biodiesel or fuel-from-excess-solar/wind might be the only other option. Or thorium powerplants for ships.
just-ok 6y ago
It’s honestly a shame that we didn’t keep pursuing sail technology. It’s great that we’re finally getting somewhere environmentally-friendly with ship tech nowadays as in the OP, but if we’d put the same amount of effort to innovate and advance sails like we did steam, I imagine we’d have pretty amazing (and completely green) methods of transport for all but the heaviest cargo loads (and even then, just split the load across multiple ships?). Of course, nowadays the tech is probably so far behind that the cost of the necessary innovations to “catch up” sails to modern powering methods is completely prohibitive; I guess the environment will continue to take one for the team...
- bnegreve 6y ago
  > It’s honestly a shame that we didn’t keep pursuing sail technology. We did, modern sail boats are much faster than they used to be and can almost sail against the wind (~30° from the wind direction). Fastest sail boats can cross the Atlantic in few days now. (speed record: 3days15h [1]) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_sailing_record https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_sailing_record
  - lm28469 6y ago
    Isn't it purely for sport though ?
- sosborn 6y ago
  I’m genuinely curious, what innovations could there possibly be for sails beyond increasing surface area or either the sails or the keel?
  - satori99 6y ago
    It is worth noting that rigging and sails for lightweight racing hulls has evolved way beyond anything that has ever been used commercially -- And would look quite weird (though still recognizable) to a 19th C sailor [0]. Also, the material science involved in creating laminated sailcloth is very close to state-of-the-art. Of course, racing yachts go fast because they weigh very little. Also, Kitesails [1] have been proposed many times over the last few decades, but I've not heard of anyone using one commercially. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wingsail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wingsail [1] https://cleantechnica.com/2018/09/11/airbus-seawing-kite-sails-to-cut-fuel-costs-for-cargo-ships-20/ https://cleantechnica.com/2018/09/11/airbus-seawing-kite-sai...
axaxs 6y ago
I've been long enamored with Philippine boat making. The first time I was asked if I wanted to ride in a canoe, I said no and had horrid flashbacks of tipping over in dirty ponds in the south USA. Theirs, even homemade ones, have stabilizers. Such a simple, but brilliant idea.
- ruste 6y ago
  This is likely because stabilizers don't make sense for the usecase of those in the southern US. Canoes there were typically used navigating between rivers, creeks, and lakes where the stabilizer would be cumbersome due to plant life and just size. Ocean going canoes, or canoes on large rivers don't encounter these problems in the same way making stabilizers worthwhile
russfink 6y ago
Novice here - isn't there some static hull shape that would react to waves and result in motion, much like those plastic widgets that spin only in one direction?
- onion2k 6y ago
  This design is capturing energy from the vertical vector of wave's motion, so it works regardless of the direction of the wave or the boat. Capturing the horizontal part of the wave would be possible, but only if you wanted your boat to travel in the same direction and at the same speed as the wave. That's not so useful.
- erikmolin 6y ago
  surfboard shape?
- el_tone 6y ago
  You can capture wave motion in all directions with a pendulum based design like this: https://www.witt-energy.com/howitworks.html https://www.witt-energy.com/howitworks.html
barbegal 6y ago
Are there any technical details available for this system? The linked article doesn't do a good job of explaining how it works or how much impact it will have. Assuming the boat can harness 10% of the wave's energy, wave power in the Philippines is more like 10kW per meter of wave length captured on average so that equates to ~1kW per metre of wave. Let's assume this boat can capture roughly 10m of wave then that is an average power generation of ~10kW or ~ 10hp. A boat of this size will probably have 500+ hp engines so a boost of 10hp won't have a huge amount of impact.
- bildung 6y ago
  Found another article with more numbers: "The ship’s “independent multi-engine technology at minimum 3000hp drive shaft sea class” is combined with a wave energy device that’s capable of generating up to 300kw/h of energy, Salvador explains." https://news.mongabay.com/2020/04/a-wave-powered-ferry-aims-to-forge-a-new-path-for-shipping-in-the-philippines/ https://news.mongabay.com/2020/04/a-wave-powered-ferry-aims-...
  - lippel82 6y ago
    300kw/h is a nonsensical unit in this case. kw*h would be energy, but kw alone would be the proper unit to compare to the 3000hp drive shaft.
    - handol 6y ago
      300 kilowatt-hours per hour
- Zeebrommer 6y ago
  This is exactly the kind of order-of-magnitude estimation that I was looking for in the article. Where did you get the wave energy numbers?
  - mambru 6y ago
    Probably this[1] is the same boat? [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_Trimaran_(Philippine_ship) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_Trimaran_(Philippine_sh...
redis_mlc 6y ago
Darn, I forget which day of the week this is on HN ... is it Mars colonization, FTL travel, electric airliners, drone passenger airlines or wind-powered shipping day? They're all SciFi, so I guess it doesn't matter, now does it?
Theodores 6y ago
This is a great endeavour but where is the scale model that proved the concept? I know scale models don't meet up with realistic waves when on a pond but it would be nice to see this working. As it is the story is not there yet!
- julosflb 6y ago
  Indeed. A pond will probably not have the right wave. But the concept can be easily tested with a small scale model in any of the numerous wave tanks around the world for a tiny fraction of the cost of a full scale prototype... This kind of wave action scales very well using so called Froud scaling.

215 points by awk 6y ago

> The emissions from travel it took to report this story were 0kg CO2. The digital emissions from this story are an estimated 1.2g to 3.6g CO2 per page view. Maybe this is what finally could push companies towards making lighter and more efficient websites? At least an estimate of a webpages watt usage (server and client side).

mehrdadn 6y ago
> The digital emissions from this story are an estimated 1.2g to 3.6g CO2 per page view. Holy cow, that is a lot. 1-3 grams of CO2 per single load of a page? Makes me feel guilty about even clicking the article.
- dtech 6y ago
  That is not a lot. it's about 4mWh for coal power. In comparison, leaving a 300W computer setup on for 10 hours each day with coal power is 3KWh or 2.5kg of CO2.
  - akiselev 6y ago
    So it takes the computing power equivalent of a 300W PC running for 10 hours to serve a thousand page views? At 50 req/page view, that server is handling ~1.5 requests per second. That kind of throughput can be handled by a RaspberryPi, so are we seriously wasting 95%+ of the power budget routing packets and idling servers?
    - ben_w 6y ago
      A million, not a thousand. Milliwatt-hours to kilowatt-hours.
- baaym 6y ago
  When I reached the bottom of the page it even loaded an extra article. Now that's a real waste of CO2.
- abbe98 6y ago
  Sending a short email is estimated to release 4g CO2: https://phys.org/news/2015-11-carbon-footprint-email.html https://phys.org/news/2015-11-carbon-footprint-email.html
- pjc50 6y ago
  The average human breathes out 1g of CO2 every minute and a half. By comparison, average UK cars put out 124.5g for every km driven. It's not nothing, but it's not a lot either. It probably is worth evaluating the electrical efficiency of the tech industry as a whole, both in terms of highly executed code hotspots and entire pieces of business of questionable utility (ad javascript, cryptocurrency proof-of-waste), but individual web pages are the plastic straws of the industry compared to the giant flare stacks of real problems.
  - maelito 6y ago
    Ads and all the services that make a modern Web page should be included in the estimation.
  - aembleton 6y ago
    It's the equivalent of driving 19 metres in an average UK car. That's not far, but that is for a single web page. That seems incredibly high to me.
  - reportgunner 6y ago
    What is the comparison of the number of cars in the world versus the number of people in the world ?
    - pjc50 6y ago
      Estimates of vehicles in use (including commercial) seem to be about 1.2 billion. But the relevant number is surely total miles driven?
- sephamorr 6y ago
  I'm having a very hard time rationalizing these numbers. Something has to have some very poor assumptions: Let's assume each page load is ~1mbit, and it's being served from 1000km away. 1mbit may be low, but most of it will presumably be content delivered by a CDN which is far closer than 1000km. The reference design (which I work on) for 400G DWDM systems are ~100W for 2 transceivers + EDFA + switches, for a standard 80km link. Assuming we hop every 80km (which should be conservative here), we get 3mJ for the energy through the network. The previous generation is probably 10x worse, so ~30mJ. Let's add the endpoint too; Wifi router + cable modem (12W or rather 3W marginal power since it's running anyway/ 200mbit) = 15mJ And finally for the server. I'd hope the server could do 1k requests per second, and that should amortize against backends, etc (2k RPS, but frontend + DB backend server, maybe), maybe 150W for the server, so 150mJ. This gives us 200mJ for a page load. Using California's current (1:28am) emissions for power generation of 0.274 mT/MWh (it's 1/3rd of this during the day), this yields 15ug/request. Where do the remaining 5 orders of magnitude come from? What am I missing? If TCO/production energy of the server was included, that couldn't more than double it (capex in a datacenter < opex, and if 100% of the server cost was for energy, we could double, but this is wildly conservative)
  - barbegal 6y ago
    Here is the methodology https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200131-why-and-how-does-future-planet-count-carbon https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200131-why-and-how-does... I think most of it comes from your client device. Your laptop may be using 50W of power or about 20g of CO2 per hour so reading the article for 6 minutes is ~2g of CO2.
    - maelito 6y ago
      In case someone wants to do the math again : 50W for 1 hour : 50Wh or 0.050kWh California : 187gCO₂eq/kWh according to https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/US-CAL-CISO https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/US-CAL-CISO -> 9.35gCO₂eq/h -> 0.16g/min -> 0.935g for 6 minutes
      - sephamorr 6y ago
- wiz21c 6y ago
  Just watching a movie about CO2 emissions is order of magnitudes above.
manveru 6y ago
I recently saw another site that tries to offset its carbon footprint: https://mynoise.net/carbonFootprintCompensation.php https://mynoise.net/carbonFootprintCompensation.php I hope this becomes more prevalent at least for paid services.
throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
Not the whole story. The link provides more details (https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200131-why-and-how-does-future-planet-count-carbon https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200131-why-and-how-does...) It involves counting carbon from journalists' travel etc. So a full tally (which is good but isn't just about literal pages loaded) I also wonder how much JS + adverts have to offer as part of that carbon load.
perfunctory 6y ago
Why on earth would it finally push companies to do anything? Where is the profit motive in this? I am not against lighter websites. But it's not gonna happen unless we start pricing carbon.
maelito 6y ago
We need an open source model for estimating the CO2 emissions of a server, of the network (including CDNs, etc.), of a device.
reportgunner 6y ago
I was also disappointed with the amount of text compared to the amount of information in the article. It seemed like every paragraph started with for sure you have been in the waves so you know they are waves
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  Agreed, far too much waffle. The first three paragraphs don't even mention the new ship design.
jonshariat 6y ago
I remember writing a paper in college about what the environmental impact of a web page was. One of the biggest energy savings Identified by far was changing the color of your website to use dark backgrounds.

aussieguy1234 6y ago

I've been in one of the traditional Philippines boats on a trip to an island in not so calm seas, we hired the boat and crew for the day. It was an interesting but scary experience, probably won't be doing it again. The island was decent.

bigbluedots 6y ago

Aren't all ships partly powered by wave energy if they're facing the right way?

Xylakant 6y ago
No, generally speaking, waves pass underneath a floating object in practically all circumstances. You may feel like there’s a forward surge when a wave comes in from behind, but all forward momentum gained while sliding down the wave is lost once the wave peak has overtaken you and you’re climbing back up the wave. Basically, waves will induce a circular motion on a floating object. There’s ways to trick and gain forward speed from waves, by basically picking a wave that’s high enough and continually sliding down on the front - Surfers for example. But that only works if your object is substantially smaller than the wave in question - which is sort of impossible for ships.
- bigbluedots 6y ago
  Thank you for such a thoughtful response.
- julosflb 6y ago
  Second order wave effects can cause drifting also.
- michael1999 6y ago
  Nice explanation. A boat can start surfing once the waterline fits on one face of a wave, so <1/2 wavelength. So a 70m tug just needs a 200m long wave. Mind you, those waves could be 30m tall and breaking over you :-O. So not impossible, but I'm not eager to try it. https://www.passagemaker.com/lifestyle/freaks-of-nature-rogue-waves https://www.passagemaker.com/lifestyle/freaks-of-nature-rogu... The wave-glider is much more practical. https://www.liquid-robotics.com/wave-glider/how-it-works/ https://www.liquid-robotics.com/wave-glider/how-it-works/

peteretep 6y ago

Renewable energy to power boats?! It’ll never catch on

duxup 6y ago

When I see a wave foil I wonder how that doesn't make more drag than power...is this similar or something different?

pjc50 6y ago
What sort of wave foil do you mean? It's not clear from this article how the trimaran works, but you can see in the photos that there is a gap at the top of the outboard hulls. So I suspect it's the relative motion between the outboard hulls and the inboard one which is converted to hydraulic power - makes sense, it will be a short movement with a huge force behind it. That is then fed to a generator, electrical storage and propulsion unit.
- duxup 6y ago
  Most seem to involve a wing or fin extending out from the hull in some way. That seems like it would introduce drag and greatly limit speed.
  - pjc50 6y ago
    Oh this kind of thing? https://wavefoil.com/ https://wavefoil.com/ I'm assuming they've tested it and it's not entirely fraudulen and does in fact give more speed than drag?
    - duxup 6y ago
      I'm not really sure the existence of a thing really indicates efficiency or usefulness, that's not a high bar.
  - jasonwatkinspdx 6y ago
    Hydrofoils have a very high lift drag ratio. You also have to remember the wetted area of the hull produces significant drag too. Lifting most or all of the hull out out of the water can enable dramatically higher speeds, at the cost of stability and complexity. The biggest America's Cup catamarans were roughly the scale of a 7 story apartment building, but were capable of lifting their entire mass on a foil the size of an ironing board. Because of the density of water, foils can generate a lot of force as lift.

jgilias 6y ago

It looks like there's nothing in the way to put something like one of those kite-sails meant for cargo ships on a ship like this one to reduce the fuel needs and hence the carbon footprint even more.

AtlasBarfed 6y ago
Add a retractable/foldout solar array for low seas and low wind, add solar capture to the sail fabric, add windmills for side/tailwind conditions too. Would probably need to be part of a hybrid powerplant though, but if you could get even 10-20% efficiency it might pay for itself in shipping where the boats are in service for a long time usually. Long range shipping, like air travel, is a major hole in low-carbon strategies right now. Biodiesel or fuel-from-excess-solar/wind might be the only other option. Or thorium powerplants for ships.

just-ok 6y ago

It’s honestly a shame that we didn’t keep pursuing sail technology. It’s great that we’re finally getting somewhere environmentally-friendly with ship tech nowadays as in the OP, but if we’d put the same amount of effort to innovate and advance sails like we did steam, I imagine we’d have pretty amazing (and completely green) methods of transport for all but the heaviest cargo loads (and even then, just split the load across multiple ships?). Of course, nowadays the tech is probably so far behind that the cost of the necessary innovations to “catch up” sails to modern powering methods is completely prohibitive; I guess the environment will continue to take one for the team...

bnegreve 6y ago
> It’s honestly a shame that we didn’t keep pursuing sail technology. We did, modern sail boats are much faster than they used to be and can almost sail against the wind (~30° from the wind direction). Fastest sail boats can cross the Atlantic in few days now. (speed record: 3days15h [1]) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_sailing_record https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_sailing_record
- lm28469 6y ago
  Isn't it purely for sport though ?
sosborn 6y ago
I’m genuinely curious, what innovations could there possibly be for sails beyond increasing surface area or either the sails or the keel?
- satori99 6y ago
  It is worth noting that rigging and sails for lightweight racing hulls has evolved way beyond anything that has ever been used commercially -- And would look quite weird (though still recognizable) to a 19th C sailor [0]. Also, the material science involved in creating laminated sailcloth is very close to state-of-the-art. Of course, racing yachts go fast because they weigh very little. Also, Kitesails [1] have been proposed many times over the last few decades, but I've not heard of anyone using one commercially. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wingsail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wingsail [1] https://cleantechnica.com/2018/09/11/airbus-seawing-kite-sails-to-cut-fuel-costs-for-cargo-ships-20/ https://cleantechnica.com/2018/09/11/airbus-seawing-kite-sai...

axaxs 6y ago

I've been long enamored with Philippine boat making. The first time I was asked if I wanted to ride in a canoe, I said no and had horrid flashbacks of tipping over in dirty ponds in the south USA. Theirs, even homemade ones, have stabilizers. Such a simple, but brilliant idea.

ruste 6y ago
This is likely because stabilizers don't make sense for the usecase of those in the southern US. Canoes there were typically used navigating between rivers, creeks, and lakes where the stabilizer would be cumbersome due to plant life and just size. Ocean going canoes, or canoes on large rivers don't encounter these problems in the same way making stabilizers worthwhile

russfink 6y ago

Novice here - isn't there some static hull shape that would react to waves and result in motion, much like those plastic widgets that spin only in one direction?

onion2k 6y ago
This design is capturing energy from the vertical vector of wave's motion, so it works regardless of the direction of the wave or the boat. Capturing the horizontal part of the wave would be possible, but only if you wanted your boat to travel in the same direction and at the same speed as the wave. That's not so useful.
erikmolin 6y ago
surfboard shape?
el_tone 6y ago
You can capture wave motion in all directions with a pendulum based design like this: https://www.witt-energy.com/howitworks.html https://www.witt-energy.com/howitworks.html

barbegal 6y ago

Are there any technical details available for this system? The linked article doesn't do a good job of explaining how it works or how much impact it will have. Assuming the boat can harness 10% of the wave's energy, wave power in the Philippines is more like 10kW per meter of wave length captured on average so that equates to ~1kW per metre of wave. Let's assume this boat can capture roughly 10m of wave then that is an average power generation of ~10kW or ~ 10hp. A boat of this size will probably have 500+ hp engines so a boost of 10hp won't have a huge amount of impact.

bildung 6y ago
Found another article with more numbers: "The ship’s “independent multi-engine technology at minimum 3000hp drive shaft sea class” is combined with a wave energy device that’s capable of generating up to 300kw/h of energy, Salvador explains." https://news.mongabay.com/2020/04/a-wave-powered-ferry-aims-to-forge-a-new-path-for-shipping-in-the-philippines/ https://news.mongabay.com/2020/04/a-wave-powered-ferry-aims-...
- lippel82 6y ago
  300kw/h is a nonsensical unit in this case. kw*h would be energy, but kw alone would be the proper unit to compare to the 3000hp drive shaft.
  - handol 6y ago
    300 kilowatt-hours per hour
Zeebrommer 6y ago
This is exactly the kind of order-of-magnitude estimation that I was looking for in the article. Where did you get the wave energy numbers?
- mambru 6y ago
  Probably this[1] is the same boat? [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_Trimaran_(Philippine_ship) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_Trimaran_(Philippine_sh...

redis_mlc 6y ago

Darn, I forget which day of the week this is on HN ... is it Mars colonization, FTL travel, electric airliners, drone passenger airlines or wind-powered shipping day? They're all SciFi, so I guess it doesn't matter, now does it?

Theodores 6y ago

This is a great endeavour but where is the scale model that proved the concept? I know scale models don't meet up with realistic waves when on a pond but it would be nice to see this working. As it is the story is not there yet!

julosflb 6y ago
Indeed. A pond will probably not have the right wave. But the concept can be easily tested with a small scale model in any of the numerous wave tanks around the world for a tiny fraction of the cost of a full scale prototype... This kind of wave action scales very well using so called Froud scaling.