15 ms·

Battery cost declines raise prospects of all-electric container shipping

123 points by jseliger 4y ago

belltaco 4y ago
Has anyone thought of large rafts of floating solar panels being towed behind a ship? Given the massive surface area of the ocean I wonder if a few football field sized floating solar panels can recharge the batteries during the day time. Also, what about windmills on the ship itself?
- jasonjayr 4y ago
  Windmills on boats? So like, sails? :) Iirc there has also been wind-driven electrical generating devices on boats too.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  > Also, what about windmills on the ship itself? Great idea, powering a boat with wind. If only someone had thought of that sooner! Less facetiously, it's usually better to use cylindrical rotating sails (which need power, but far less) or kites. Combined with solar could be an interesting prospect though.
- gotmedium 4y ago
  Solar may be highly unlikely due to waves and salt salinization. See windmill ships for more on the second question > https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windmill_ship https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windmill_ship
- ok_dad 4y ago
  A few football fields would cause a lot of water drag and also probably not even be enough power. A solar panel is about half a kW, and I’m guessing a big ship like that will take upwards of 80 to 100 MW normally, so you need like 160k to 200k panels.
- Retric 4y ago
  Large container ships are already larger than football fields. As in 61.5m wide and 400m long, though not a rectangle they are surprisingly boxy. You might get 4MW in ideal conditions and average a little over 1MW over the day, but those engines are putting out 58MW, these ships need a lot of power 24/7. Remember for scale those 20,000 little boxes stacked up are the exact same thing you see semi trucks carrying.
  - ProjectArcturis 4y ago
    It still might be worth doing, for a 2% reduction in fuel costs.
    - Retric 4y ago
      Kites are much cheaper and save you far more fuel.
- googlryas 4y ago
  Drag. If you really wanted to do only green shipping, you could have these pads sprinkled across the Atlantic/Pacific, and have boats pull up them to charge up so they can make it to the next pad and hop across the ocean.
- cogman10 4y ago
  I calculated it out once. The issue is container ships need MASSIVE amounts of energy to move. As for windmills on the ship... well... sails are a thing we've used for generations :D No reason to convert mechanical energy into electric energy back into mechanical energy.
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    In terms of the scale of energy. The largest masts in the world are on the order of 100m. An 80m blade wind turbine is rated 8MW or so. A container ship produces 50MW or so. It'd be feasible for slow steaming if you couldn't use sails for some reason.
    - cogman10 4y ago
      I just don't see the point. That 8MW is after the energy loses of converting mechanical to electric energy. That process is 20->40% efficient (meaning 12->32ish MW is ultimately lost to friction). A mast is much more efficient simply because it's not doing the mechanical to electrical transition. Perhaps it's worth it if you charged batteries while docked and used those batteries + mast mode while sailing? A hybrid if you will?
      - Schroedingersat 4y ago
        The potential upsides I can see are: ability to point or move through canals without tacking; time averaging; and geometry to work around the cargo better. A kite seems like a better solution, but maybe a hybrid might be an option -- ie. get some power from wind and the rest from a battery. Then if you have to wait for a port or canal you're gaining range the whole time. Could throw solar into the mix, but without high efficiency tilting panels it's hardly relevant.
- 6t6t6t6 4y ago
  > Also, what about windmills on the ship itself? You mean, like sails?
- markdestouches 4y ago
  Large surface area means a lot of friction. I didn't do the math, but my feeling is it's not going to be feasible.
ianai 4y ago
Just use nuclear.
- ok_dad 4y ago
  As a former navy nuke: no. I don’t want commercial vessels registered in Nosafetystandardsland to have nuclear power. Fuck no. It’s also not even a little economical.
  - pxmpxm 4y ago
    >vessels registered in Nosafetystandardsland Ha will have to borrow that
    - selimthegrim 4y ago
      It’s where the clouds from cloud-cuckoo land dump all their rain and the man with message in cleft stick returns.
  - ianai 4y ago
    - sbierwagen 4y ago
      >Don’t have them be commercial. So the proposal here is to... nationalize all ocean freight?
      - ianai 4y ago
        Sounds similar to the Marshall plan don’t it?
    - krallja 4y ago
      > Don’t have them be commercial What other purpose do you believe shipping vessels to serve?
xbmcuser 4y ago
I have been predicting this for the past few years. Batteries shaped as shipping containers with container ships replacing spent batteries on shipping ports they visit is the future for shipping.
- epistasis 4y ago
  And throw them on trains for electric freight without having to run expensive catenaries. Shipping containers full of batteries are the basic shape of current grid storage too, which is growing exponentially even if it's only in the 10s of GW per year right now (corresponding to 4x the GWh, usually, but grid resources are typically defined primarily by their power rather than energy.) Being able to place a shipping container of battery next to a distribution center to avoid an upgrade to transmission and distribution will also enable tons of savings on electricity grid costs, as transmission and distribution must be sized to peak capacity, and which often results in extremely low average usage of the expensive resource. In most places in the US, transmission and distribution is a bigger cost that the generation of electricity. Storage is going to change everything, and the naysayers who make up fake "physics" to pretend it can't work have already been proven very wrong.
  - sofixa 4y ago
    > And throw them on trains for electric freight without having to run expensive catenaries I'd love to see the math on this, because I can't imagine it will cost less than electrifying railways (at least the heavily used ones) over a prolonged period of time (say, a decade or two). Batteries need to be swapped out which will waste time, and replaced every so often. Catenaries need maintenance and have a high upfront cost, but still..
  - bluGill 4y ago
    https://pedestrianobservations.com/2022/07/13/in-motion-charging-is-not-for-trains/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/2022/07/13/in-motion-char... Is a good discussion on why catenary is better than batteries for trains.
    - 4y ago
olivermarks 4y ago
This is one of the endless physics defying articles implying 'acceleration' towards a fantasy all-electric future. Batteries are really heavy and will be exhausted of power very quickly by the continuous load from underwater propellor propulsion. A small nuclear reactor powered boat would work but the idea of battery powered container ships is specious at best.
- epistasis 4y ago
  > will be exhausted of power very quickly by the continuous load from underwater propellor propulsion. Sorry, this is your "physics"? Edit: just to be clear but there's an entire paper published in a high profile journal, peer-reviewed, and and the comment is "nuh uh" while appealing to non-existent physics principles to try to fake authority.
  - olivermarks 4y ago
    https://www.freightwaves.com/news/how-many-gallons-of-fuel-does-a-container-ship-carry https://www.freightwaves.com/news/how-many-gallons-of-fuel-d... A low end panamax container ship would require fifty-six million, nine hundred twenty-five thousand KwH of energy (56925 mwh). Academics and beancounters tend to miss out critical factors in how things get done in practice, not in theory. “Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you're a thousand miles from the corn field.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower
    - epistasis 4y ago
      Is a tendency to miss some practical concerns the same as "physics defying" or have you just completely shifted arguments without acknowledging that your former one was completely fabricated and anti-scientific? What does your number have to do with the practicality of the prospects of electric container ships? You threw out a number, now justify what you think that means. A big number is supposed to do what?
      - olivermarks 4y ago
iinnPP 4y ago
What happens when we run out of Lithium?
- bdamm 4y ago
  Then we mine more from whatever is convenient. Lithium is abundant in the earth, and can even be extracted from ocean water. Lithium is one of the easiest elements to acquire.
  - _hypx 4y ago
    Lithium isn’t easy to mine, and basically impossible to extract in meaningful quantities from seawater. The word itself derives from lithos, meaning rock, because it is usually found in certain rocks. This hints at the challenges it takes to mine it. Lithium is a lot like the rare earth element, which means while it is technically not a rare substance, good ores of it however are rare.
    - Tade0 4y ago
      > basically impossible to extract in meaningful quantities from seawater. The impossible has been made possible: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2021/EE/D1EE00354B#!divAbstract https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2021/EE/D1EE0...
      - _hypx 4y ago
        Wrong. It is still impossible due to the extremely low concentrations of lithium. Studies like these are just wishful thinking. Just because you can extract minute quantities of it doesn’t make it remotely economically viable.
- hedora 4y ago
  The earth's crust is 20ppm lithium, and the oceans are 0.17ppm. A typical EV has ~22lbs of lithium per ~3000 lbs of vehicle weight, which works out to 7333 ppm lithium. If my math is right, we would have to turn ~1/366th of the earths crust to EVs in order to "run out" of lithium. Extraction costs are a different issue.
rexreed 4y ago
How about a wind-powered boat powered completely without any batteries or oil at all? Let's call it... a sailboat. Are we just going back in time to when sail-powered ships powered commerce? Of course a sail-powered container ship might not be as viable, but I'd love to see a 16-masted sailing behemoth. The Wikipedia article about the Thomas W. Larson makes for interesting reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_W._Lawson_(ship) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_W._Lawson_(ship)
- outlog 4y ago
  https://www.theoceanbird.com/ https://www.theoceanbird.com/ - are creating a 200m ship, slated for 2026 - with plans for retrofittable products..
- Retric 4y ago
  There are still some smaller commercial cargo sailing ships, it’s somewhat ambiguous when the last major sailing ship stopped but 1949 is one reasonable date. The less obvious issue is simply manpower and difficulty loading intermodal containers.
  - cogman10 4y ago
    What sort of manpower is required? Seems like loading the intermodal containers could be somewhat automated as well (granted, space would be limited due to the mast/s) I'm no sailor though. Just seems like we have more ability to finely control/automate stuff in ways that weren't available in 1949.
    - Retric 4y ago
      In terms of manpower, you can largely automate the sails today, though they do require maintenance. The issue is you basically need the same crew on a 20 TEU ship as a 20,000 TEU one, because you can’t safely operate with everyone asleep. Except sails scale in terms of surface vs drag scaling in part base on volume which makes mega sailing ships much more difficult. Now these aren’t insurmountable issues on their own, but wind as supplemental power via kites or something seems like a far more viable option.
option 4y ago
nuclear powered ships seems like a great fit for modern container shipping as it has already been tried on aircraft carriers and submarines.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  Yes. Let's put 200kg of high grade U235 on a boat guarded by 6 guys and drive it past somalia. That will work out great.
  - option 4y ago
    lets put tons of very dirty fuel on boat and drive it past somalia where pirates and criminals can actually make use of said fuel. And in meantime lets just burn it while the boat floats
    - Schroedingersat 4y ago
      I'm quite happy with a world where we do neither if that bothers you as much as you're pretending it does.
thelastgallon 4y ago
Nuclear ships and intercontinental renewable connections can fulfill all energy needs [1] [2] . Nuclear ships can be flexibly deployed to supply power anywhere in the world if there is an emergency. It is unlikely we'll have low power production worldwide at the same time. A small fleet can address a range of concerns. Better yet, they can carry cargo, 40% of shipping, that is 4.5 billion tons out of the 11 billion tons of total maritime shipping is fossil fuels. [3]. We could have 40% of ships fleet as nuclear ships instead of carrying fossil fuels. If we have the tech to have 40% fleet nuclear, why not make it 100%? There are hundreds (or thousands?) of ships and they can carry cargo as well as supply power when docked. Of course, we have to add PowerDocks at ports and a connection from port to the grid. Ships use the dirtiest fuel. Large ocean-going ships tend to use bunker fuel, the world’s dirtiest diesel fuel – a toxic, tar-like sludge that usually contains 3,500 times more sulphur than the diesel used for cars.[4] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia-Asia_Power_Link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia-Asia_Power_Link [2] https://www.power-technology.com/projects/morocco-uk-power-project-morocco/ https://www.power-technology.com/projects/morocco-uk-power-p... [3] https://qz.com/2113243/forty-percent-of-all-shipping-cargo-consists-of-fossil-fuels/ https://qz.com/2113243/forty-percent-of-all-shipping-cargo-c... [4] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/may/18/dirty-diesel-ships-worst-offenders-pollutionwatch https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/may/18/dirty-diesel...
- beachy 4y ago
  Does nuclear (or could it) make financial sense for cargo transport though? For the military, where victory is far more important than margins, sure. But can it compete with fossil fuel when there is a profit motive?
- tonny747 4y ago
  Ignoring all the safety and security concerns nuclear cargo ships would have, I can't imagine it being very economical.
  - XorNot 4y ago
    Security is not much of a concern. An attempt to seize the ship means you can failsafe the reactor and drop it to the bottom of the ocean. Pirates and lesser nation-states won't have the resources to recover it.
nickhalfasleep 4y ago
I wonder if a series of small robotic tugboats could take turns hauling a container ship across oceans. As their battery wears down, another swaps in place. They could recharge at nearby fixed solar/wind floating platforms, or undersea cable recharge points.
- zeristor 4y ago
  A bit like stage coaches swapping horses at each inn along the way. I don’t think tugs though can operate in anything above fairly calm waters.
- LeChuck 4y ago
  I think you underestimate the distances involved. It'll be impossible to maintain the infrastructure. How are you going to get these people there? Additionally, You will need an enormous number of tugs. It's' not like there are clearly marked highways or anything. The area to be covered is going to be huge. What are they going to do in bad weather? Then, who is going to coordinate all of this? How do the tugs know where to go and when? If the weather is bad and there is no fresh tug available the ship will go down. Let's not even talk about how inefficient and slow this will be. The forces of nature these ships work against are nothing to sneeze at. This stuff is not at all trivial.
  - Jyaif 4y ago
    The idea is clever because it does not require retrofitting the existing fleet, and it works because it can be done incrementally. You can for example start with 1 tug boat that would shave off 200km of fuel usage.
    - HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
      No, it's not "clever." It's ridiculously uninformed. Tugboats are far less efficient than the ship running under its own power to start with. Add to that you now have a fleet of tugboats and their associated crews (robotic tugboats are nice in concept; not so great as a reality in 2022) sitting idle/travelling to meet a ship/recharging/etc. And more vehicles that require ongoing maintenance whether or not they're in use. A clever idea would be supported by data that shows how it can be effective. This is just an off the cuff suggestion by someone who's thought about the problem for 30 seconds.
spankalee 4y ago
Airbus's Airseas subsidiary is working on a kite system that can reduce fuel consumption by a claimed 20%: https://www.airseas.com/ https://www.airseas.com/ Seems like a kite + battery combination could be quite effective.
biophysboy 4y ago
What's the situation with cobalt? I know lithium is everywhere, but the fact that so much of cobalt is mined in DRC worries me.
- SECProto 4y ago
  Lithium iron phosphate batteries [1] do not use any cobalt and are becoming widespread in battery electric vehicles. Cheaper but less power and energy dense - worth it trade off. Similar calculations would likely apply for shipping. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_iron_phosphate_battery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_iron_phosphate_battery
  - chrismartin 4y ago
    Also, LiFePo4 last for several thousands of full-depth charge cycles. Several times longer than lithium ion.
  - rcMgD2BwE72F 4y ago
    You can read about the current state of battery chemistry here: https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/961cfc6c-6a8c-42bb-a3ef-57f3657b7aca/GlobalSupplyChainsofEVBatteries.pdf https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/961cfc6c-6a8c-42bb-... (July 2020 report on Global Supply Chains of EV Batteries by the International Energy Agency). Page 13 (PDF file count) is titled "Resurgence of LFP".
mikewarot 4y ago
>a 300 MW charging station Assume 90% efficiency - that means dropping 30 Megawatts of heat into the water in port. That could be a problem. Also - 300 Megawatt single point loads? What's that going to do to grid stability?
- _hypx 4y ago
  It’s nuts. You can’t take the study seriously. Charging a few of these ships will easily overwhelm the local grid.
  - Scoundreller 4y ago
    An idea would be to load a fully-charged container battery onto the ship when it’s otherwise loading up. You’d probably want it on a (top) corner for cooling and security anyway, but that could cause centre of gravity problems… Ports are usually well connected to infrastructure rights-of-way, so running a double or triple digit kV line to it isn’t out of line.
    - _hypx 4y ago
      The article is suggesting 300 MW of power draw per ship for around 24 hours. There is no extra time to recharge separately from the ship. So even if you did that, it makes no difference to the power grid. You will need truly enormous grid upgrades to make this feasible. It's sad that people on this website are falling for this. This is completely unrealistic. It will show up on one of those Youtube channels that mock scam energy proposals if it ever gets funding.
      - Scoundreller 4y ago
        The idea of the container batteries is that they don't have to be rapid-charged, but having batteries sitting around isn't productive either. I think the hard part is having 300MW (*#ships) of peaking capacity and the standby costs of when it's not being used. For reference, Toronto uses about 4500MW on a hot summer day (like today).
Scoundreller 4y ago
I think all-electric is a stretch goal. Start off with replacing all of the electric loads on a container ship with batteries. I’m going to rule-of-thumb it and say 10% of a cargo ship’s energy load is electrical. It’s better to quickly convert 100% of cargo ships to hybrid operation than getting 10% of cargo ships to become 100% electric. Edit: this paper says that electric loads are 17% of energy on a medium sized cargo ship: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335751506_STUDY_ON_CONTAINER_SHIP_ENERGY_CONSUMPTION https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335751506_STUDY_ON_... The least efficient part of any ship is turning mechanical energy into electrical, so just leave alone the mechanical part (thrust) for now. (It’s an old idea of mine that never happened: a kit that could turn any ICE vehicle into a hybrid. More and more loads are becoming electrical instead of mechanical, e.g. electric cooling pumps, electric power steering pumps, electronic transmission, electric hvac, in addition to what was always electric: fuel pump, lighting, control systems).
- WJW 4y ago
  > The least efficient part of any ship is turning mechanical energy into electrical Electrical generators can reach 90+% efficiency at turning mechanical energy into electricity. Did you mean to claim turning chemical energy into electrical?
  - Scoundreller 4y ago
    No, I meant chemical to mechanical to electrical is inefficient.
- bell-cot 4y ago
  THIS, but even more so. Electric ships sound cool, but shipping is giga-scale global infrastructure. The mines, battery factories, electric motors, dockside equipment, etc. needed to do this at scale don't exist. If they did, the national power grids sitting behind most major ports could not reliably take the additional load. So, yes, start small. As in: "Here is one self-contained, mostly self-managing battery, inside one cargo container. We'll modify the electrical system on one ship, so that this battery can connect to it, and looks (electrically, and to the ship's control systems) like one extra generator in the engine room. Once we see how well that works, and fix round 1 of bugs and crew training issues, then we'll try to scale up to 10 ships."
Traubenfuchs 4y ago
Any idea which companies / ETFs one should invest in for the growing demand in batteries? Or are the evaluations at their limit already anyways.
pfdietz 4y ago
Laser power beamed from space. Cover the top of the ship with a large cooled PV array.
- dr-detroit 4y ago
Gravityloss 4y ago
Ships move such long distances that batteries will be very expensive and will eat a large proportion of the useful load. Ammonia fuel cells, or, as stopgap, even ammonia burned in diesel engines could be a much better fit. https://techxplore.com/news/2021-03-world-high-temperature-ammonia-powered-fuel-cell.html https://techxplore.com/news/2021-03-world-high-temperature-a... Absence of cheap bunker oil would though maybe motivate for more efficient designs / operations. Ie slowers speeds, variable schedules and all that.
12many 4y ago
Can we just skip the inefficient electric market phase all together? It's not gonna last and its not any cleaner than fossil fuels so stop kidding yourselves... The military already uses nuclear power for their ships why not the cargo ships?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- chii 4y ago
  is a nuclear powered ship really that much more efficient? The aircraft carrier design goals isn't to make a lightweight, large carry capacity vehicle with low maintenance costs, so i don't see why those designs would fulfill a commercial shipping need.
- greedo 4y ago
  Staffing a reactor is expensive and risky compared to electric tech. The risk to reward ratio is too skewed for this to be economically feasible.

123 points by jseliger 4y ago

Has anyone thought of large rafts of floating solar panels being towed behind a ship? Given the massive surface area of the ocean I wonder if a few football field sized floating solar panels can recharge the batteries during the day time. Also, what about windmills on the ship itself?

jasonjayr 4y ago
Windmills on boats? So like, sails? :) Iirc there has also been wind-driven electrical generating devices on boats too.
Schroedingersat 4y ago
> Also, what about windmills on the ship itself? Great idea, powering a boat with wind. If only someone had thought of that sooner! Less facetiously, it's usually better to use cylindrical rotating sails (which need power, but far less) or kites. Combined with solar could be an interesting prospect though.
gotmedium 4y ago
Solar may be highly unlikely due to waves and salt salinization. See windmill ships for more on the second question > https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windmill_ship https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windmill_ship
ok_dad 4y ago
A few football fields would cause a lot of water drag and also probably not even be enough power. A solar panel is about half a kW, and I’m guessing a big ship like that will take upwards of 80 to 100 MW normally, so you need like 160k to 200k panels.
Retric 4y ago
Large container ships are already larger than football fields. As in 61.5m wide and 400m long, though not a rectangle they are surprisingly boxy. You might get 4MW in ideal conditions and average a little over 1MW over the day, but those engines are putting out 58MW, these ships need a lot of power 24/7. Remember for scale those 20,000 little boxes stacked up are the exact same thing you see semi trucks carrying.
- ProjectArcturis 4y ago
  It still might be worth doing, for a 2% reduction in fuel costs.
  - Retric 4y ago
    Kites are much cheaper and save you far more fuel.
googlryas 4y ago
Drag. If you really wanted to do only green shipping, you could have these pads sprinkled across the Atlantic/Pacific, and have boats pull up them to charge up so they can make it to the next pad and hop across the ocean.
cogman10 4y ago
I calculated it out once. The issue is container ships need MASSIVE amounts of energy to move. As for windmills on the ship... well... sails are a thing we've used for generations :D No reason to convert mechanical energy into electric energy back into mechanical energy.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  In terms of the scale of energy. The largest masts in the world are on the order of 100m. An 80m blade wind turbine is rated 8MW or so. A container ship produces 50MW or so. It'd be feasible for slow steaming if you couldn't use sails for some reason.
  - cogman10 4y ago
    I just don't see the point. That 8MW is after the energy loses of converting mechanical to electric energy. That process is 20->40% efficient (meaning 12->32ish MW is ultimately lost to friction). A mast is much more efficient simply because it's not doing the mechanical to electrical transition. Perhaps it's worth it if you charged batteries while docked and used those batteries + mast mode while sailing? A hybrid if you will?
    - Schroedingersat 4y ago
      The potential upsides I can see are: ability to point or move through canals without tacking; time averaging; and geometry to work around the cargo better. A kite seems like a better solution, but maybe a hybrid might be an option -- ie. get some power from wind and the rest from a battery. Then if you have to wait for a port or canal you're gaining range the whole time. Could throw solar into the mix, but without high efficiency tilting panels it's hardly relevant.
6t6t6t6 4y ago
> Also, what about windmills on the ship itself? You mean, like sails?
markdestouches 4y ago
Large surface area means a lot of friction. I didn't do the math, but my feeling is it's not going to be feasible.

ianai 4y ago

Just use nuclear.

ok_dad 4y ago
As a former navy nuke: no. I don’t want commercial vessels registered in Nosafetystandardsland to have nuclear power. Fuck no. It’s also not even a little economical.
- pxmpxm 4y ago
  >vessels registered in Nosafetystandardsland Ha will have to borrow that
  - selimthegrim 4y ago
    It’s where the clouds from cloud-cuckoo land dump all their rain and the man with message in cleft stick returns.
- ianai 4y ago
  - sbierwagen 4y ago
    >Don’t have them be commercial. So the proposal here is to... nationalize all ocean freight?
    - ianai 4y ago
      Sounds similar to the Marshall plan don’t it?
  - krallja 4y ago
    > Don’t have them be commercial What other purpose do you believe shipping vessels to serve?

xbmcuser 4y ago

I have been predicting this for the past few years. Batteries shaped as shipping containers with container ships replacing spent batteries on shipping ports they visit is the future for shipping.

epistasis 4y ago
And throw them on trains for electric freight without having to run expensive catenaries. Shipping containers full of batteries are the basic shape of current grid storage too, which is growing exponentially even if it's only in the 10s of GW per year right now (corresponding to 4x the GWh, usually, but grid resources are typically defined primarily by their power rather than energy.) Being able to place a shipping container of battery next to a distribution center to avoid an upgrade to transmission and distribution will also enable tons of savings on electricity grid costs, as transmission and distribution must be sized to peak capacity, and which often results in extremely low average usage of the expensive resource. In most places in the US, transmission and distribution is a bigger cost that the generation of electricity. Storage is going to change everything, and the naysayers who make up fake "physics" to pretend it can't work have already been proven very wrong.
- sofixa 4y ago
  > And throw them on trains for electric freight without having to run expensive catenaries I'd love to see the math on this, because I can't imagine it will cost less than electrifying railways (at least the heavily used ones) over a prolonged period of time (say, a decade or two). Batteries need to be swapped out which will waste time, and replaced every so often. Catenaries need maintenance and have a high upfront cost, but still..
- bluGill 4y ago
  https://pedestrianobservations.com/2022/07/13/in-motion-charging-is-not-for-trains/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/2022/07/13/in-motion-char... Is a good discussion on why catenary is better than batteries for trains.
  - 4y ago

olivermarks 4y ago

This is one of the endless physics defying articles implying 'acceleration' towards a fantasy all-electric future. Batteries are really heavy and will be exhausted of power very quickly by the continuous load from underwater propellor propulsion. A small nuclear reactor powered boat would work but the idea of battery powered container ships is specious at best.

epistasis 4y ago
> will be exhausted of power very quickly by the continuous load from underwater propellor propulsion. Sorry, this is your "physics"? Edit: just to be clear but there's an entire paper published in a high profile journal, peer-reviewed, and and the comment is "nuh uh" while appealing to non-existent physics principles to try to fake authority.
- olivermarks 4y ago
  https://www.freightwaves.com/news/how-many-gallons-of-fuel-does-a-container-ship-carry https://www.freightwaves.com/news/how-many-gallons-of-fuel-d... A low end panamax container ship would require fifty-six million, nine hundred twenty-five thousand KwH of energy (56925 mwh). Academics and beancounters tend to miss out critical factors in how things get done in practice, not in theory. “Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you're a thousand miles from the corn field.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower
  - epistasis 4y ago
    Is a tendency to miss some practical concerns the same as "physics defying" or have you just completely shifted arguments without acknowledging that your former one was completely fabricated and anti-scientific? What does your number have to do with the practicality of the prospects of electric container ships? You threw out a number, now justify what you think that means. A big number is supposed to do what?
    - olivermarks 4y ago

iinnPP 4y ago

What happens when we run out of Lithium?

bdamm 4y ago
Then we mine more from whatever is convenient. Lithium is abundant in the earth, and can even be extracted from ocean water. Lithium is one of the easiest elements to acquire.
- _hypx 4y ago
  Lithium isn’t easy to mine, and basically impossible to extract in meaningful quantities from seawater. The word itself derives from lithos, meaning rock, because it is usually found in certain rocks. This hints at the challenges it takes to mine it. Lithium is a lot like the rare earth element, which means while it is technically not a rare substance, good ores of it however are rare.
  - Tade0 4y ago
    > basically impossible to extract in meaningful quantities from seawater. The impossible has been made possible: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2021/EE/D1EE00354B#!divAbstract https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2021/EE/D1EE0...
    - _hypx 4y ago
      Wrong. It is still impossible due to the extremely low concentrations of lithium. Studies like these are just wishful thinking. Just because you can extract minute quantities of it doesn’t make it remotely economically viable.
hedora 4y ago
The earth's crust is 20ppm lithium, and the oceans are 0.17ppm. A typical EV has ~22lbs of lithium per ~3000 lbs of vehicle weight, which works out to 7333 ppm lithium. If my math is right, we would have to turn ~1/366th of the earths crust to EVs in order to "run out" of lithium. Extraction costs are a different issue.

rexreed 4y ago

How about a wind-powered boat powered completely without any batteries or oil at all? Let's call it... a sailboat. Are we just going back in time to when sail-powered ships powered commerce? Of course a sail-powered container ship might not be as viable, but I'd love to see a 16-masted sailing behemoth. The Wikipedia article about the Thomas W. Larson makes for interesting reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_W._Lawson_(ship) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_W._Lawson_(ship)

outlog 4y ago
https://www.theoceanbird.com/ https://www.theoceanbird.com/ - are creating a 200m ship, slated for 2026 - with plans for retrofittable products..
Retric 4y ago
There are still some smaller commercial cargo sailing ships, it’s somewhat ambiguous when the last major sailing ship stopped but 1949 is one reasonable date. The less obvious issue is simply manpower and difficulty loading intermodal containers.
- cogman10 4y ago
  What sort of manpower is required? Seems like loading the intermodal containers could be somewhat automated as well (granted, space would be limited due to the mast/s) I'm no sailor though. Just seems like we have more ability to finely control/automate stuff in ways that weren't available in 1949.
  - Retric 4y ago
    In terms of manpower, you can largely automate the sails today, though they do require maintenance. The issue is you basically need the same crew on a 20 TEU ship as a 20,000 TEU one, because you can’t safely operate with everyone asleep. Except sails scale in terms of surface vs drag scaling in part base on volume which makes mega sailing ships much more difficult. Now these aren’t insurmountable issues on their own, but wind as supplemental power via kites or something seems like a far more viable option.

option 4y ago

nuclear powered ships seems like a great fit for modern container shipping as it has already been tried on aircraft carriers and submarines.

Schroedingersat 4y ago
Yes. Let's put 200kg of high grade U235 on a boat guarded by 6 guys and drive it past somalia. That will work out great.
- option 4y ago
  lets put tons of very dirty fuel on boat and drive it past somalia where pirates and criminals can actually make use of said fuel. And in meantime lets just burn it while the boat floats
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    I'm quite happy with a world where we do neither if that bothers you as much as you're pretending it does.

thelastgallon 4y ago

Nuclear ships and intercontinental renewable connections can fulfill all energy needs [1] [2] . Nuclear ships can be flexibly deployed to supply power anywhere in the world if there is an emergency. It is unlikely we'll have low power production worldwide at the same time. A small fleet can address a range of concerns. Better yet, they can carry cargo, 40% of shipping, that is 4.5 billion tons out of the 11 billion tons of total maritime shipping is fossil fuels. [3]. We could have 40% of ships fleet as nuclear ships instead of carrying fossil fuels. If we have the tech to have 40% fleet nuclear, why not make it 100%? There are hundreds (or thousands?) of ships and they can carry cargo as well as supply power when docked. Of course, we have to add PowerDocks at ports and a connection from port to the grid. Ships use the dirtiest fuel. Large ocean-going ships tend to use bunker fuel, the world’s dirtiest diesel fuel – a toxic, tar-like sludge that usually contains 3,500 times more sulphur than the diesel used for cars.[4] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia-Asia_Power_Link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia-Asia_Power_Link [2] https://www.power-technology.com/projects/morocco-uk-power-project-morocco/ https://www.power-technology.com/projects/morocco-uk-power-p... [3] https://qz.com/2113243/forty-percent-of-all-shipping-cargo-consists-of-fossil-fuels/ https://qz.com/2113243/forty-percent-of-all-shipping-cargo-c... [4] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/may/18/dirty-diesel-ships-worst-offenders-pollutionwatch https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/may/18/dirty-diesel...

beachy 4y ago
Does nuclear (or could it) make financial sense for cargo transport though? For the military, where victory is far more important than margins, sure. But can it compete with fossil fuel when there is a profit motive?
tonny747 4y ago
Ignoring all the safety and security concerns nuclear cargo ships would have, I can't imagine it being very economical.
- XorNot 4y ago
  Security is not much of a concern. An attempt to seize the ship means you can failsafe the reactor and drop it to the bottom of the ocean. Pirates and lesser nation-states won't have the resources to recover it.

nickhalfasleep 4y ago

I wonder if a series of small robotic tugboats could take turns hauling a container ship across oceans. As their battery wears down, another swaps in place. They could recharge at nearby fixed solar/wind floating platforms, or undersea cable recharge points.

zeristor 4y ago
A bit like stage coaches swapping horses at each inn along the way. I don’t think tugs though can operate in anything above fairly calm waters.
LeChuck 4y ago
I think you underestimate the distances involved. It'll be impossible to maintain the infrastructure. How are you going to get these people there? Additionally, You will need an enormous number of tugs. It's' not like there are clearly marked highways or anything. The area to be covered is going to be huge. What are they going to do in bad weather? Then, who is going to coordinate all of this? How do the tugs know where to go and when? If the weather is bad and there is no fresh tug available the ship will go down. Let's not even talk about how inefficient and slow this will be. The forces of nature these ships work against are nothing to sneeze at. This stuff is not at all trivial.
- Jyaif 4y ago
  The idea is clever because it does not require retrofitting the existing fleet, and it works because it can be done incrementally. You can for example start with 1 tug boat that would shave off 200km of fuel usage.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
    No, it's not "clever." It's ridiculously uninformed. Tugboats are far less efficient than the ship running under its own power to start with. Add to that you now have a fleet of tugboats and their associated crews (robotic tugboats are nice in concept; not so great as a reality in 2022) sitting idle/travelling to meet a ship/recharging/etc. And more vehicles that require ongoing maintenance whether or not they're in use. A clever idea would be supported by data that shows how it can be effective. This is just an off the cuff suggestion by someone who's thought about the problem for 30 seconds.

spankalee 4y ago

Airbus's Airseas subsidiary is working on a kite system that can reduce fuel consumption by a claimed 20%: https://www.airseas.com/ https://www.airseas.com/ Seems like a kite + battery combination could be quite effective.

biophysboy 4y ago

What's the situation with cobalt? I know lithium is everywhere, but the fact that so much of cobalt is mined in DRC worries me.

SECProto 4y ago
Lithium iron phosphate batteries [1] do not use any cobalt and are becoming widespread in battery electric vehicles. Cheaper but less power and energy dense - worth it trade off. Similar calculations would likely apply for shipping. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_iron_phosphate_battery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_iron_phosphate_battery
- chrismartin 4y ago
  Also, LiFePo4 last for several thousands of full-depth charge cycles. Several times longer than lithium ion.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 4y ago
  You can read about the current state of battery chemistry here: https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/961cfc6c-6a8c-42bb-a3ef-57f3657b7aca/GlobalSupplyChainsofEVBatteries.pdf https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/961cfc6c-6a8c-42bb-... (July 2020 report on Global Supply Chains of EV Batteries by the International Energy Agency). Page 13 (PDF file count) is titled "Resurgence of LFP".

mikewarot 4y ago

>a 300 MW charging station Assume 90% efficiency - that means dropping 30 Megawatts of heat into the water in port. That could be a problem. Also - 300 Megawatt single point loads? What's that going to do to grid stability?

_hypx 4y ago
It’s nuts. You can’t take the study seriously. Charging a few of these ships will easily overwhelm the local grid.
- Scoundreller 4y ago
  An idea would be to load a fully-charged container battery onto the ship when it’s otherwise loading up. You’d probably want it on a (top) corner for cooling and security anyway, but that could cause centre of gravity problems… Ports are usually well connected to infrastructure rights-of-way, so running a double or triple digit kV line to it isn’t out of line.
  - _hypx 4y ago
    The article is suggesting 300 MW of power draw per ship for around 24 hours. There is no extra time to recharge separately from the ship. So even if you did that, it makes no difference to the power grid. You will need truly enormous grid upgrades to make this feasible. It's sad that people on this website are falling for this. This is completely unrealistic. It will show up on one of those Youtube channels that mock scam energy proposals if it ever gets funding.
    - Scoundreller 4y ago
      The idea of the container batteries is that they don't have to be rapid-charged, but having batteries sitting around isn't productive either. I think the hard part is having 300MW (*#ships) of peaking capacity and the standby costs of when it's not being used. For reference, Toronto uses about 4500MW on a hot summer day (like today).

Scoundreller 4y ago

I think all-electric is a stretch goal. Start off with replacing all of the electric loads on a container ship with batteries. I’m going to rule-of-thumb it and say 10% of a cargo ship’s energy load is electrical. It’s better to quickly convert 100% of cargo ships to hybrid operation than getting 10% of cargo ships to become 100% electric. Edit: this paper says that electric loads are 17% of energy on a medium sized cargo ship: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335751506_STUDY_ON_CONTAINER_SHIP_ENERGY_CONSUMPTION https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335751506_STUDY_ON_... The least efficient part of any ship is turning mechanical energy into electrical, so just leave alone the mechanical part (thrust) for now. (It’s an old idea of mine that never happened: a kit that could turn any ICE vehicle into a hybrid. More and more loads are becoming electrical instead of mechanical, e.g. electric cooling pumps, electric power steering pumps, electronic transmission, electric hvac, in addition to what was always electric: fuel pump, lighting, control systems).

WJW 4y ago
> The least efficient part of any ship is turning mechanical energy into electrical Electrical generators can reach 90+% efficiency at turning mechanical energy into electricity. Did you mean to claim turning chemical energy into electrical?
- Scoundreller 4y ago
  No, I meant chemical to mechanical to electrical is inefficient.
bell-cot 4y ago
THIS, but even more so. Electric ships sound cool, but shipping is giga-scale global infrastructure. The mines, battery factories, electric motors, dockside equipment, etc. needed to do this at scale don't exist. If they did, the national power grids sitting behind most major ports could not reliably take the additional load. So, yes, start small. As in: "Here is one self-contained, mostly self-managing battery, inside one cargo container. We'll modify the electrical system on one ship, so that this battery can connect to it, and looks (electrically, and to the ship's control systems) like one extra generator in the engine room. Once we see how well that works, and fix round 1 of bugs and crew training issues, then we'll try to scale up to 10 ships."

Traubenfuchs 4y ago

Any idea which companies / ETFs one should invest in for the growing demand in batteries? Or are the evaluations at their limit already anyways.

pfdietz 4y ago

Laser power beamed from space. Cover the top of the ship with a large cooled PV array.

dr-detroit 4y ago

Gravityloss 4y ago

Ships move such long distances that batteries will be very expensive and will eat a large proportion of the useful load. Ammonia fuel cells, or, as stopgap, even ammonia burned in diesel engines could be a much better fit. https://techxplore.com/news/2021-03-world-high-temperature-ammonia-powered-fuel-cell.html https://techxplore.com/news/2021-03-world-high-temperature-a... Absence of cheap bunker oil would though maybe motivate for more efficient designs / operations. Ie slowers speeds, variable schedules and all that.

12many 4y ago

Can we just skip the inefficient electric market phase all together? It's not gonna last and its not any cleaner than fossil fuels so stop kidding yourselves... The military already uses nuclear power for their ships why not the cargo ships?

deleted 4y ago
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chii 4y ago
is a nuclear powered ship really that much more efficient? The aircraft carrier design goals isn't to make a lightweight, large carry capacity vehicle with low maintenance costs, so i don't see why those designs would fulfill a commercial shipping need.
greedo 4y ago
Staffing a reactor is expensive and risky compared to electric tech. The risk to reward ratio is too skewed for this to be economically feasible.