27 ms·

Designs for battery tankers to transport renewable energy by 2026

24 points by rsecora 3y ago

Aulig 3y ago
I wonder if this is worth it. Such a ship is a large one-time investment - just like connecting landmasses with a cable is, which would be a lot more efficient long term I imagine.
- BiteCode_dev 3y ago
  The boat can change route.
  - hef19898 3y ago
    And still needs a grid to connect to. Either that or a ton of USB plugs and really long USB-C cables.
    - blitzar 3y ago
      Please dont make it a mini-usb connector, I have only just managed to purge the last of the electronics that require this standard from my home.
      - prettyStandard 3y ago
        Nah, we are switching to USB-D
      - BiteCode_dev 3y ago
        Wireless charging. And as a bonus, during war times it doubles as a death ray.
danbruc 3y ago
The proposed capacity of 241 MWh is equivalent to a tank truck of gasoline, 26 m³.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Aachen 3y ago
  Insane, the amounts of energy we casually carry around. It has to be said, though, that electricity is useful for a lot more than petrol is. If you'd want to use this 26m³ for powering some machine, like your vacuum cleaner, you'll lose a lot of this energy in the process (wikipedia says "most engines retain an average efficiency of about 18–20%") whereas putting electrons through a wire into an electric motor has much lower losses ("up to 98% for permanent magnet motors", another Wikipedia article).
  - HPsquared 3y ago
    Indeed, really you would need four tank cars (104 m³). EDIT: or, 1.73kg of natural uranium used in a standard PWR fuel cycle.. or, 31 grams of natural uranium utilized in a fast reactor. Edit edit: forgot to convert for thermal efficiency again, make that 7kg of uranium for a PWR cycle, and 124 grams in a fast reactor.
    - danbruc 3y ago
      To clarify the 26 m³, that is the gasoline volume with the same energy content as the proposed ship. Tank truck capacities seem to be in the range from 10 m³ for small ones to semi-trailers with 40 m³.
Gasp0de 3y ago
I would think this can only ever be useful in places where a connection is needed only for a short time, e.g. to compensate the loss of a connection. Not only are battery tankers a huge investment, they also have an extremely short lifespan. According to the article, their batteries have a lifespan of 6000 cycles and a capacity of 241MWh. That means that during it's lifetime, one ship can transport 1446000MWh of energy. According to this study (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589004221014668 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S258900422...), it costs 41.5$ to transport 1MWh 1000 miles across high voltage dc lines (including initial investment). That would be 10,000$ for a 1000mile trip for this ship. I believe there might be some edge cases where it is absolutely impossible to build cables or the link is only needed for very short timespans but other than that I don't see this become profitable.
- rob74 3y ago
  I also checked the date of the article several times to make sure it's not an April fools' joke... and then I thought to myself "is it really so difficult to build power lines now that they have to resort to shipping batteries around?". Even for those edge cases where it's absolutely impossible to build cables, shipping e.g. liquid hydrogen or another renewable fuel is probably a better alternative...
  - hef19898 3y ago
    Or just accept that for some cases, using non-renewble energy sources is more feasible. E.g. disaster relieve, instead of parking a battery ship, that still needs a grid to connect to, use diesel generators and conventional tankers.
- hef19898 3y ago
  Well, we have internet using hundreds of expendable satelites that is somehow expected to be cheaper than 5G or fibre. For some reason, people really seem to dislike cables...
  - tonmoy 3y ago
XorNot 3y ago
This is a terrible idea when nuclear powered aircraft carriers and submarines exist. Just...build a couple of those reactors into this thing, put it under military control for logistics purposes and get a much better system. Edit: in fact basically you'd take the tanker form factor, build in a large desalination plant, hospital and kitchen and basically produce the disaster relief/logistics supertanker hopefully at a lower price then an aircraft carrier.
- pjc50 3y ago
  Nuclear powered civilian ship run by minimum wage staff with a Liberian or Panamanian flag? Are you sure? Oh, military control. At which point the cost becomes either ridiculous or hidden in a different budget.
- rob74 3y ago
  The Russians already did something similar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademik_Lomonosov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademik_Lomonosov Ok, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_nuclear_power_plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_nuclear_power_plant the US had a prototype in the 1960s already, but the project was ultimately scrapped...
- pydry 3y ago
  >nuclear powered aircraft carriers and submarines exist. provided you dont mind 10x-ing your electric bill...
  - XorNot 3y ago
    A tanker full of batteries isn't going to move enough energy to be worth it. Chemical batteries are god awful for stationary power applications. You'd be better off synthesizing carbon fuel from the air or electrolyzing hydrogen...or using the technology we already have which can just do it (nuclear).
  - pyrale 3y ago
    That's basically the assumption made by this project.
intrasight 3y ago
It makes much more sense to just repurpose container ships - of which there is a glut I think. What we should be transporting (ships, trains, trucks) is standard modular power units. Perhaps the glut of shipping containers could be repurposed to manufacture large standard modular power units.
- bartislartfast 3y ago
  it would be super ironic if we were using old crude oil powered container ships to move around units of renewable energy
throw0101b 3y ago
"Forty percent of all shipping cargo consists of fossil fuels": * 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... * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29850631 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29850631 I'm not sure it is a good idea to expend energy to move energy.
- floatrock 3y ago
  All "unlocked" energy requires a certain energy investment: drilling, pipelines, refineries, tankers, setting power lines, running a solar silicon factory, setting up a wind turbine... The question is always what's your multiple on energy return from energy invested, and how does it compare to the alternatives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment
anentropic 3y ago
I don't understand ... there are already transmission cables for moving electricity around ... what is a use case that makes this worthwhile?
RecycledEle 3y ago
This is not going to work.
- RecycledEle 3y ago
  Now I will get out of the way of the people trying to make it work.
floatrock 3y ago
Other threads are discussing whether the specific numbers here pencil out, but to step back a second and take a high-level snapshot: the trend here is that batteries are becoming cheap enough to consider bulk transport of electricity. Yes, there's questions about weight and power density and all that, but slap your classic techno-exponential curve on all that and ask yourself what becomes interesting after 10 years of riding the experience curve? There's already companies looking at filling a shipping container with batteries and using them for temporary events like construction sites, concerts, or disaster relief. This ship idea takes it to the extreme: boats have the lowest dollar-per-weight-mile costs, so what use-cases become interesting when the limiting factor becomes techno-decreasing battery costs?
omneity 3y ago
I see several shortcomings with this design: - High investment cost to adopt the tech. - High manufacturing and maintenance cost for this level of integration. (especially due to the battery short lifespan) - Energy loss during power transfer, when unloading the electricity. A more modular design could work better imo. Make it so the vessel can load/unload standard power modules via rails/warehouse-like robots. The standard power modules could be made from smaller, standard batteries such as Tesla powerpacks or future grid battery modules so that the cost of using this vessel on top of a renewable grid becomes marginal, and hot-swapping the fully charged modules with the empty ones ensures power is not transmitted twice. Other benefits of standard modules is that production costs for battery modules will go down, and transmission could also happen on land over trains or trucks if the economic equation works out, or for extremely remote areas with limited local power generation capabilities. In fact a whole ecosystem of hot-swappable residential modules could be bootstrapped, making it easy to deploy a single home installation or a microgrid in a remote area, all the way to a town, city, island or nation-wide grid.

24 points by rsecora 3y ago

I wonder if this is worth it. Such a ship is a large one-time investment - just like connecting landmasses with a cable is, which would be a lot more efficient long term I imagine.

BiteCode_dev 3y ago
The boat can change route.
- hef19898 3y ago
  And still needs a grid to connect to. Either that or a ton of USB plugs and really long USB-C cables.
  - blitzar 3y ago
    Please dont make it a mini-usb connector, I have only just managed to purge the last of the electronics that require this standard from my home.
    - prettyStandard 3y ago
      Nah, we are switching to USB-D
    - BiteCode_dev 3y ago
      Wireless charging. And as a bonus, during war times it doubles as a death ray.

danbruc 3y ago

The proposed capacity of 241 MWh is equivalent to a tank truck of gasoline, 26 m³.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Aachen 3y ago
Insane, the amounts of energy we casually carry around. It has to be said, though, that electricity is useful for a lot more than petrol is. If you'd want to use this 26m³ for powering some machine, like your vacuum cleaner, you'll lose a lot of this energy in the process (wikipedia says "most engines retain an average efficiency of about 18–20%") whereas putting electrons through a wire into an electric motor has much lower losses ("up to 98% for permanent magnet motors", another Wikipedia article).
- HPsquared 3y ago
  Indeed, really you would need four tank cars (104 m³). EDIT: or, 1.73kg of natural uranium used in a standard PWR fuel cycle.. or, 31 grams of natural uranium utilized in a fast reactor. Edit edit: forgot to convert for thermal efficiency again, make that 7kg of uranium for a PWR cycle, and 124 grams in a fast reactor.
  - danbruc 3y ago
    To clarify the 26 m³, that is the gasoline volume with the same energy content as the proposed ship. Tank truck capacities seem to be in the range from 10 m³ for small ones to semi-trailers with 40 m³.

Gasp0de 3y ago

I would think this can only ever be useful in places where a connection is needed only for a short time, e.g. to compensate the loss of a connection. Not only are battery tankers a huge investment, they also have an extremely short lifespan. According to the article, their batteries have a lifespan of 6000 cycles and a capacity of 241MWh. That means that during it's lifetime, one ship can transport 1446000MWh of energy. According to this study (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589004221014668 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S258900422...), it costs 41.5$ to transport 1MWh 1000 miles across high voltage dc lines (including initial investment). That would be 10,000$ for a 1000mile trip for this ship. I believe there might be some edge cases where it is absolutely impossible to build cables or the link is only needed for very short timespans but other than that I don't see this become profitable.

rob74 3y ago
I also checked the date of the article several times to make sure it's not an April fools' joke... and then I thought to myself "is it really so difficult to build power lines now that they have to resort to shipping batteries around?". Even for those edge cases where it's absolutely impossible to build cables, shipping e.g. liquid hydrogen or another renewable fuel is probably a better alternative...
- hef19898 3y ago
  Or just accept that for some cases, using non-renewble energy sources is more feasible. E.g. disaster relieve, instead of parking a battery ship, that still needs a grid to connect to, use diesel generators and conventional tankers.
hef19898 3y ago
Well, we have internet using hundreds of expendable satelites that is somehow expected to be cheaper than 5G or fibre. For some reason, people really seem to dislike cables...
- tonmoy 3y ago

XorNot 3y ago

This is a terrible idea when nuclear powered aircraft carriers and submarines exist. Just...build a couple of those reactors into this thing, put it under military control for logistics purposes and get a much better system. Edit: in fact basically you'd take the tanker form factor, build in a large desalination plant, hospital and kitchen and basically produce the disaster relief/logistics supertanker hopefully at a lower price then an aircraft carrier.

pjc50 3y ago
Nuclear powered civilian ship run by minimum wage staff with a Liberian or Panamanian flag? Are you sure? Oh, military control. At which point the cost becomes either ridiculous or hidden in a different budget.
rob74 3y ago
The Russians already did something similar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademik_Lomonosov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademik_Lomonosov Ok, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_nuclear_power_plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_nuclear_power_plant the US had a prototype in the 1960s already, but the project was ultimately scrapped...
pydry 3y ago
>nuclear powered aircraft carriers and submarines exist. provided you dont mind 10x-ing your electric bill...
- XorNot 3y ago
  A tanker full of batteries isn't going to move enough energy to be worth it. Chemical batteries are god awful for stationary power applications. You'd be better off synthesizing carbon fuel from the air or electrolyzing hydrogen...or using the technology we already have which can just do it (nuclear).
- pyrale 3y ago
  That's basically the assumption made by this project.

intrasight 3y ago

It makes much more sense to just repurpose container ships - of which there is a glut I think. What we should be transporting (ships, trains, trucks) is standard modular power units. Perhaps the glut of shipping containers could be repurposed to manufacture large standard modular power units.

bartislartfast 3y ago
it would be super ironic if we were using old crude oil powered container ships to move around units of renewable energy

throw0101b 3y ago

"Forty percent of all shipping cargo consists of fossil fuels": * 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... * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29850631 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29850631 I'm not sure it is a good idea to expend energy to move energy.

floatrock 3y ago
All "unlocked" energy requires a certain energy investment: drilling, pipelines, refineries, tankers, setting power lines, running a solar silicon factory, setting up a wind turbine... The question is always what's your multiple on energy return from energy invested, and how does it compare to the alternatives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment

anentropic 3y ago

I don't understand ... there are already transmission cables for moving electricity around ... what is a use case that makes this worthwhile?

RecycledEle 3y ago

This is not going to work.

RecycledEle 3y ago
Now I will get out of the way of the people trying to make it work.

floatrock 3y ago

Other threads are discussing whether the specific numbers here pencil out, but to step back a second and take a high-level snapshot: the trend here is that batteries are becoming cheap enough to consider bulk transport of electricity. Yes, there's questions about weight and power density and all that, but slap your classic techno-exponential curve on all that and ask yourself what becomes interesting after 10 years of riding the experience curve? There's already companies looking at filling a shipping container with batteries and using them for temporary events like construction sites, concerts, or disaster relief. This ship idea takes it to the extreme: boats have the lowest dollar-per-weight-mile costs, so what use-cases become interesting when the limiting factor becomes techno-decreasing battery costs?

omneity 3y ago

I see several shortcomings with this design: - High investment cost to adopt the tech. - High manufacturing and maintenance cost for this level of integration. (especially due to the battery short lifespan) - Energy loss during power transfer, when unloading the electricity. A more modular design could work better imo. Make it so the vessel can load/unload standard power modules via rails/warehouse-like robots. The standard power modules could be made from smaller, standard batteries such as Tesla powerpacks or future grid battery modules so that the cost of using this vessel on top of a renewable grid becomes marginal, and hot-swapping the fully charged modules with the empty ones ensures power is not transmitted twice. Other benefits of standard modules is that production costs for battery modules will go down, and transmission could also happen on land over trains or trucks if the economic equation works out, or for extremely remote areas with limited local power generation capabilities. In fact a whole ecosystem of hot-swappable residential modules could be bootstrapped, making it easy to deploy a single home installation or a microgrid in a remote area, all the way to a town, city, island or nation-wide grid.