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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 an

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."
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  Maybe we could build out the ships, the battery factories, the dockside equipment, the new generation capacity and the grid upgrades at the same time? Is it really a problem that the dockside equipment doesn't exist if the electric boats don't exist either? We'll all feel foolish if we turn round in the year 2050 with a global fleet of electric container ships ready to go and then we start arguing about who was supposed to build the sockets to plug them in.
  - treeman79 4y ago
    California can’t even build a train that’s useful without blowing obscene amounts of money. https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckdevore/2020/02/26/californias-high-speed-rail-project-devolving-from-political-pork-to-an-ego-monument-to-trump-resistance/amp/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckdevore/2020/02/26/californ...
    - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
      Big things cost a lot of money. I expect better arguments than "$X billion is a lot of money" and "theyre only doing it to spite Trump" if someone wants to argue against a big infrastructure project. Rail is a good and useful thing. The USA should probably have more of it. I have no real knowledge about this specific project, but my priors are that any "crazy", "green" project from California is perfectly fine, sensible governance that is probably saving lives, the environment and money, and that the people screaming about it don't know what they are talking about. But I'm open to credible info to the contrary. (A quick glance at Wikipedia tells me that the people of California think it's a good idea, and that the people who don't are generally older and republican leaning, which pretty much meshes with my priors, so I'm fairly confident it's a good thing overall).
      - treeman79 4y ago
        By this logic we shouldn’t question how much we spend for anything.
      - 4y ago
Someone 4y ago
I would start with smaller ships and shorter distances and build from there. https://zeroemissionservices.nl/en/homepage/ https://zeroemissionservices.nl/en/homepage/ seems to work for short distance inland shipping (‘seems’ to because from what I can tell, they only have a single customer with a single ship, making it more like a demonstrator)
newsclues 4y ago
I’d like to see a fleet of autonomous small ships. Start with car carriers for expensive cars.
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  Part of the logic of current big ships is fuel efficiency. If fuel was much cheaper, (which is true for renewable energy) then more, smaller ships might make sense. If the crew could be automated, that further tips towards fleets of smaller ships. This then has knock on effects for variable delivery times (fast and expensive as well as slow and cheap) and the size of canals and ports, and dredging requirements which allows things to arrive closer to their final destination.
  - electronWizard 4y ago
    I don't think most people appreciate how automated commercial vessels already are. The ship navigates autonomously from port to port. If you have a twenty man crew on a commercial vessel, they are split across two 12 hours shifts, you may only have one officer on the bridge during on watch, a few engineers below supervising the engines and performing preventative maintenance while underway, and able seamen will be doing the rounds checking nothing amiss such as loads moving etc. The crew are largely there to respond in the event of a crisis as commercial vessels are such an expensive asset. I think it's better to think of the crew doing underway asset management than "sailing" the vessel.
    - greenonions 4y ago
      If the automation is there, is there a reason why more container ships at least partially utilize wind for locomotion? Is it just that retrofitting a giant sail isn't feasible onto existing ships?
      - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
        Flettner Rotor sails appear to be becoming a thing, they partner well with electric ships, similar to how some electric planes use multiple propellers and EV automobiles can do independent 4 wheel drive. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotor_ship https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotor_ship Actually the analog to the all wheel thing might be: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azipod https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azipod
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
Hybrids, as with cars, provide the most benefit when you can run the engine at its sweet spot more often. I believe some cargo ships have had relatively tiny batteries for a long time, for port maneuvering where the engine is throttled way down. To prevent pollution they now often are forced to plug in when in port too. So I'd guess this is already just going to happen as battery costs reduce and pollution controls and costs rise, but maybe won't have a big impact on long voyages, though every little bit helps. The other big play in this space is green ammonia, but similarly early moves are to just burn it in modified diesel engines. Longer term they can electrify with fuel cells. And obviously those two can work together as Fuel Cell vehicles are basically hybrids with the same drive trains as electric vehicles, just smaller batteries.
- twawaaay 4y ago
  Ships run at constant power for entire journey, there is no occasion to store energy for later. It only works with cars because we constantly slow down and speed up. The battery helps to smooth out the output of the engine. Cargo ships already have the output as smooth as possible, hence hybrid model makes no sense.
awiesenhofer 4y ago
Good idea. There are these containerized iron salt batteries now that energy companies use to help with renewable energy storage (or at least plan to). Maybe loading a few of those instead of cargo containers could already take care of most of a ships electricity needs - and for recharging you can just load/unload them anywhere like regular containers. Article with an image: https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/02/23/1046365/grid-storage-iron-batteries-technology/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/02/23/1046365/grid-sto...
- Scoundreller 4y ago
  Yeah exactly, just think of the ship as an electric grid and the container interties into it.
Gravityloss 4y ago
A generator or an electric motor don't have a particularly low efficiency or don't wear much? Hybrids happened in locomotives and ships way before cars. Many ships have diesel engines turning generators and then have electric motor propulsion. You can replace all 23 MW (consisting of 20 MW propulsion and 3 MW electrical) on one ship with batteries + propulsion motor. Or you can replace just the 3 MW pure electric part with batteries, getting rid of the auxiliary motors and their generators, doing it on 8 ships. In the latter case you don't need the one propulsion motor, that's true, so it might be somewhat better.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  > Hybrids happened in locomotives and ships way before cars. For locomotives: diesel locomotives were diesel-electric from the start, because conventional clutches were unable to cope with the requirements of getting a train to start. Diesel-hydraulic locomotives were a German post-war specialty, sadly the Wikipedia article doesn't say why [1]. [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesellokomotive https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesellokomotive
b112 4y ago
Meanwhile, users buy the kit, convert, get tired of charging and also gassing up, so connect an inverter to an alternator and charge up that way. "But I'm helping the environment!", they say. Edit: just realised this may seem snarky. It is just that sometimes, this is the end result I expect, regardless of legit effort to help things.
- Scoundreller 4y ago
  I feel the same about some plug-in hybrids like the “ Cayenne Turbo S E-Hybrid gets 18 mpg combined in hybrid mode and has 14 miles of range in EV mode.” But it qualifies for tax credit and HOV lanes while in single occupancy.
fdsafdsfdsa 4y ago
>The least efficient part of any ship is turning mechanical energy into electrical I think you meant "most". The least efficient step is converting chemical energy into mechanical energy. Given the cheapness of fuel oil and geneator sets, and the expense of batteries, what possible financial argument is there for doing this?
- Scoundreller 4y ago
  Fuel oil is an expensive way of generating electricity, which is why few on-land power plants use it. This is all about utilizing efficient grid power (hydro, nuclear, gas, whatever) on a ship. By grid-intertie at the ship level, re-fit costs are minimized. Kinda like rooftop solar.
  - fdsafdsfdsa 4y ago
    Fuel oil is a very cheap way of generating power, when you have several thousand tons of it already on your ship :) The possible few percantage difference in efficiency between ship-based oil-powered generation, and land-based power generation, is more than wiped out by the storage and conversion losses of a battery-based system. It's also very expensive (and heavy). Why pay to fill a container with batteries, and then pay more to charge them, when you can be paid to carry a container of other stuff as cargo?
    - Scoundreller 4y ago
      Crude oil is about 3% of global electricity production and continues falling. And the efficiency is particularly bad when you’re using it in a reciprocating engine (as on a ship) instead of a turbine (as on land). Natgas and coal are cheaper hydrocarbons. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.ELC.PETR.ZS https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.ELC.PETR.ZS Oil’s benefit is its density, storability and pumpability. All I know is that a giant ship is the most cost-effective way to transport anything heavy by vehicle. A few percent improved efficiency in exchange for losing a handful of container capacity on a ship carrying several thousand is a net positive. And cargo shipping is a tight business. Battery storage and conversion losses are far less than the conversion losses from generating electricity from an ICE.
squarefoot 4y ago
> a kit that could turn any ICE vehicle into a hybrid. Doable but unpractical in many situations. Internal combustion engine based vehicles are usually a lot heavier than their electric-born counterparts, so their performance would suffer.
- Scoundreller 4y ago
  It’s usually the opposite: electric vehicles are heavier than their ICE equivalents: https://www.reviewgeek.com/116061/are-electric-trucks-heavier-and-more-dangerous-than-traditional-pickups/ https://www.reviewgeek.com/116061/are-electric-trucks-heavie...

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."

ZeroGravitas 4y ago
Maybe we could build out the ships, the battery factories, the dockside equipment, the new generation capacity and the grid upgrades at the same time? Is it really a problem that the dockside equipment doesn't exist if the electric boats don't exist either? We'll all feel foolish if we turn round in the year 2050 with a global fleet of electric container ships ready to go and then we start arguing about who was supposed to build the sockets to plug them in.
- treeman79 4y ago
  California can’t even build a train that’s useful without blowing obscene amounts of money. https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckdevore/2020/02/26/californias-high-speed-rail-project-devolving-from-political-pork-to-an-ego-monument-to-trump-resistance/amp/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckdevore/2020/02/26/californ...
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    Big things cost a lot of money. I expect better arguments than "$X billion is a lot of money" and "theyre only doing it to spite Trump" if someone wants to argue against a big infrastructure project. Rail is a good and useful thing. The USA should probably have more of it. I have no real knowledge about this specific project, but my priors are that any "crazy", "green" project from California is perfectly fine, sensible governance that is probably saving lives, the environment and money, and that the people screaming about it don't know what they are talking about. But I'm open to credible info to the contrary. (A quick glance at Wikipedia tells me that the people of California think it's a good idea, and that the people who don't are generally older and republican leaning, which pretty much meshes with my priors, so I'm fairly confident it's a good thing overall).
    - treeman79 4y ago
      By this logic we shouldn’t question how much we spend for anything.
    - 4y ago

Someone 4y ago

I would start with smaller ships and shorter distances and build from there. https://zeroemissionservices.nl/en/homepage/ https://zeroemissionservices.nl/en/homepage/ seems to work for short distance inland shipping (‘seems’ to because from what I can tell, they only have a single customer with a single ship, making it more like a demonstrator)

newsclues 4y ago

I’d like to see a fleet of autonomous small ships. Start with car carriers for expensive cars.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago
Part of the logic of current big ships is fuel efficiency. If fuel was much cheaper, (which is true for renewable energy) then more, smaller ships might make sense. If the crew could be automated, that further tips towards fleets of smaller ships. This then has knock on effects for variable delivery times (fast and expensive as well as slow and cheap) and the size of canals and ports, and dredging requirements which allows things to arrive closer to their final destination.
- electronWizard 4y ago
  I don't think most people appreciate how automated commercial vessels already are. The ship navigates autonomously from port to port. If you have a twenty man crew on a commercial vessel, they are split across two 12 hours shifts, you may only have one officer on the bridge during on watch, a few engineers below supervising the engines and performing preventative maintenance while underway, and able seamen will be doing the rounds checking nothing amiss such as loads moving etc. The crew are largely there to respond in the event of a crisis as commercial vessels are such an expensive asset. I think it's better to think of the crew doing underway asset management than "sailing" the vessel.
  - greenonions 4y ago
    If the automation is there, is there a reason why more container ships at least partially utilize wind for locomotion? Is it just that retrofitting a giant sail isn't feasible onto existing ships?
    - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
      Flettner Rotor sails appear to be becoming a thing, they partner well with electric ships, similar to how some electric planes use multiple propellers and EV automobiles can do independent 4 wheel drive. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotor_ship https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotor_ship Actually the analog to the all wheel thing might be: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azipod https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azipod

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

Hybrids, as with cars, provide the most benefit when you can run the engine at its sweet spot more often. I believe some cargo ships have had relatively tiny batteries for a long time, for port maneuvering where the engine is throttled way down. To prevent pollution they now often are forced to plug in when in port too. So I'd guess this is already just going to happen as battery costs reduce and pollution controls and costs rise, but maybe won't have a big impact on long voyages, though every little bit helps. The other big play in this space is green ammonia, but similarly early moves are to just burn it in modified diesel engines. Longer term they can electrify with fuel cells. And obviously those two can work together as Fuel Cell vehicles are basically hybrids with the same drive trains as electric vehicles, just smaller batteries.

twawaaay 4y ago
Ships run at constant power for entire journey, there is no occasion to store energy for later. It only works with cars because we constantly slow down and speed up. The battery helps to smooth out the output of the engine. Cargo ships already have the output as smooth as possible, hence hybrid model makes no sense.

awiesenhofer 4y ago

Good idea. There are these containerized iron salt batteries now that energy companies use to help with renewable energy storage (or at least plan to). Maybe loading a few of those instead of cargo containers could already take care of most of a ships electricity needs - and for recharging you can just load/unload them anywhere like regular containers. Article with an image: https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/02/23/1046365/grid-storage-iron-batteries-technology/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/02/23/1046365/grid-sto...

Scoundreller 4y ago
Yeah exactly, just think of the ship as an electric grid and the container interties into it.

Gravityloss 4y ago

A generator or an electric motor don't have a particularly low efficiency or don't wear much? Hybrids happened in locomotives and ships way before cars. Many ships have diesel engines turning generators and then have electric motor propulsion. You can replace all 23 MW (consisting of 20 MW propulsion and 3 MW electrical) on one ship with batteries + propulsion motor. Or you can replace just the 3 MW pure electric part with batteries, getting rid of the auxiliary motors and their generators, doing it on 8 ships. In the latter case you don't need the one propulsion motor, that's true, so it might be somewhat better.

mschuster91 4y ago
> Hybrids happened in locomotives and ships way before cars. For locomotives: diesel locomotives were diesel-electric from the start, because conventional clutches were unable to cope with the requirements of getting a train to start. Diesel-hydraulic locomotives were a German post-war specialty, sadly the Wikipedia article doesn't say why [1]. [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesellokomotive https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesellokomotive

b112 4y ago

Meanwhile, users buy the kit, convert, get tired of charging and also gassing up, so connect an inverter to an alternator and charge up that way. "But I'm helping the environment!", they say. Edit: just realised this may seem snarky. It is just that sometimes, this is the end result I expect, regardless of legit effort to help things.

Scoundreller 4y ago
I feel the same about some plug-in hybrids like the “ Cayenne Turbo S E-Hybrid gets 18 mpg combined in hybrid mode and has 14 miles of range in EV mode.” But it qualifies for tax credit and HOV lanes while in single occupancy.

fdsafdsfdsa 4y ago

>The least efficient part of any ship is turning mechanical energy into electrical I think you meant "most". The least efficient step is converting chemical energy into mechanical energy. Given the cheapness of fuel oil and geneator sets, and the expense of batteries, what possible financial argument is there for doing this?

Scoundreller 4y ago
Fuel oil is an expensive way of generating electricity, which is why few on-land power plants use it. This is all about utilizing efficient grid power (hydro, nuclear, gas, whatever) on a ship. By grid-intertie at the ship level, re-fit costs are minimized. Kinda like rooftop solar.
- fdsafdsfdsa 4y ago
  Fuel oil is a very cheap way of generating power, when you have several thousand tons of it already on your ship :) The possible few percantage difference in efficiency between ship-based oil-powered generation, and land-based power generation, is more than wiped out by the storage and conversion losses of a battery-based system. It's also very expensive (and heavy). Why pay to fill a container with batteries, and then pay more to charge them, when you can be paid to carry a container of other stuff as cargo?
  - Scoundreller 4y ago
    Crude oil is about 3% of global electricity production and continues falling. And the efficiency is particularly bad when you’re using it in a reciprocating engine (as on a ship) instead of a turbine (as on land). Natgas and coal are cheaper hydrocarbons. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.ELC.PETR.ZS https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.ELC.PETR.ZS Oil’s benefit is its density, storability and pumpability. All I know is that a giant ship is the most cost-effective way to transport anything heavy by vehicle. A few percent improved efficiency in exchange for losing a handful of container capacity on a ship carrying several thousand is a net positive. And cargo shipping is a tight business. Battery storage and conversion losses are far less than the conversion losses from generating electricity from an ICE.

squarefoot 4y ago

> a kit that could turn any ICE vehicle into a hybrid. Doable but unpractical in many situations. Internal combustion engine based vehicles are usually a lot heavier than their electric-born counterparts, so their performance would suffer.

Scoundreller 4y ago
It’s usually the opposite: electric vehicles are heavier than their ICE equivalents: https://www.reviewgeek.com/116061/are-electric-trucks-heavier-and-more-dangerous-than-traditional-pickups/ https://www.reviewgeek.com/116061/are-electric-trucks-heavie...