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460-foot “battery tanker” set to ship electrons by 2026
- djmips 3y agoI guess every ship is shipping electrons right? I don't think you can call storing chemical potential energy 'electrons'. This is an interesting concept - I guess if electric cars make sense then this also makes sense for transporting energy?
- anamexis 3y agoElectric cars don't transport energy, they transport people.
- ALittleLight 3y agoThey do both. Imagine driving to pick up someone who charges their phone in your car.
- jxf 3y agoBut that's not unique to an electric car, and that's also not fundamentally different than if the passenger were 2 kg heavier.
- ALittleLight 3y agoNobody said it was unique to an electric car. If you put a giant battery in the back of a gasoline powered truck and drove it to your friends house, you could say you were transporting energy. Or if you put a tank of gas for that matter. Seems very similar.
- jsnell 3y ago> I guess if electric cars make sense then this also makes sense for transporting energy? I don't see how that follows. The point of a electric car isn't to transport the electricity, it's to transport matter. There's no shortcut here: the only realistic way (short of Star Trek transporter beams) we can get the cargo from point A to point B is by physically moving it. In contrast, we already have other ways to transport energy which work quite well. It's hard to see how this absurd concept could possibly be competitive with them.
- Null-Set 3y agoYou can put matter on grid powered trains instead of battery powered self propelled vehicles.
- trashtester 3y agoI'm sure there are edge cases where putting batteries in ships can make sense. Let's assume the following is true: 1) Two islands exist relatively close to each other. 2) Both have enough wind power to meet demand on windy days. 3) Deep waters, strong tidal currents, tsunami risk or some combination make power lines between the islands somewhat expensive or unreliable. 4) Battery storage is required to meet demand on days with little wind. 5) Storing these batteries on ships is not significantly more expensive than storing the batteries on land. (Maybe real estate prices are high, regulations are stricter on land, etc.) In such a case, it may be more economical to move the ship holding the batteries than to set up cables intended just for low wind periods. And if there are many islands involved, an ecosystem of ships may scale better than cables, for instance if demand is seasonal or varies for other reasons. Basically, these are similar reasons to why LNG regasification ships exist, instead of just building fixed land-based facilites where needed.
- adhesive_wombat 3y agoTangentially, the book The Vital Question is fascinating: it explains how life on earth is basically just proton-moving machines with flair (and how such machines could have come to evolve in the first place).
- morkalork 3y agoEvery living thing is just trying to tap into the great waterfall of entropy to spin their wheel for the little time they can.
- iancmceachern 3y agoWe're all little water wheels on the river of time
- NickM 3y agoI think most people just don’t realize that when you charge a battery you’re not literally just filling it up with electrons.
- colechristensen 3y agoYou are not. When you charge a battery you are pushing electrons from one chamber in the battery to another. A discharged battery is like two tanks of water at equal levels, charging is like pumping water from one to the other so one has a higher level and thus potential energy.
- usrusr 3y agoMy guess would be that pretty much everybody knows that this mental model is wrong, which is why the author considered it appropriate to jokingly play naive, because just calling it "bizarre" felt too weak.
- nrp 3y agoOn your first point, ‘electrons’ is an example of synecdoche: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synecdoche https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synecdoche
- londons_explore 3y ago241 megawatt hours isn't very much... A medium sized power station is say 300 megawatts. So if you want to transport this power just a few tens of miles, you probably need a fleet of 10+ ships constantly charging and discharging. I am very dubious that that works out cheaper than just laying a cable, even through deep water.
- Mizoguchi 3y agoIt's in the article: "Why not just put down an underwater cable? That's a fine question. PowerX points out that Japan is surrounded by deep seas, and prone to earthquakes, and says in a press release that "the ship-based solution resolves issues such as long downtime from undersea cable malfunctions and repairs, as well as the high costs associated with ultra-high voltage connections and substations."
- adhesive_wombat 3y agoComing from the owners of a battery factory, also sounds a bit like a Sim City news ticker message: "Pineapple-based economy a no-brainer: President of the World Pineapple Trade Federation". Then again, they could well be right on a one-ship basis and maybe that's all they need, and this needs less capital expenses like, say, a hydrogen handling terminal at each end.
- jacquesm 3y agoThat doesn't make a ship a viable alternative by itself. And there are plenty of undersea cables within Japan, including power cables. The solution would seem to be to generate power in Japan not to transport it there by such bizarre (I agree with the title here) method. But let's reserve judgment and see how it plays out in practice, I'm going to watch this one just to see how real life matches my intuition about this project.
- nradov 3y agoOK guys hear me out. Instead of building power cables let's build giant undersea pneumatic tubes and use those to deliver charged batteries from one island to another. That idea should be worthy of a few million in funding, right?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- adhesive_wombat 3y agoWhether or not this is a sound engineering decision, it also sounds a bit like a hack in Factorio that makes sense due to a quirk in game mechanics.
- linkjuice4all 3y agoThere’s the cargo ship mod and chargeable batteries and accumulators that you can ship - maybe that’s how they validated the idea in the first place…
- 0cf8612b2e1e 3y agoDyson Sphere Project has Accumulaters (batteries) you can fill on an energy rich planet and ship to another which is energy poor.
- jacquesm 3y agoI'd absolutely love to do DD on this project. It has all kinds of interesting bits to research. On the assumption that they have done their homework there must be something non-obvious that they know that outsiders don't.
- CPLX 3y agoI mean it’s a press release. Those don’t cost anything. The only application of this that seems half feasible is maybe some kind of post-disaster recovery where for whatever reason you’ve ruled out using a generator.
- jacquesm 3y agoEven then you'd probably be better off shipping a mixed load of diesel trucks and large generators. Even the larger version doesn't make a whole lot of sense, you'd be looking at keeping the ship in port for quite a while unless those batteries are going to be charging and discharging at very high rates but that would shorten their life (and hence the number of trips). They are aiming to do 'short runs' only (100 km is mentioned in the article but the economic range is a bit larger) which makes it even more dicey economically. Their transportation costs per KWh as quoted in the article exceed current generation costs by a factor of three already. 214 MWh is a proverbial drop in the bucket on grid scale and even 10x isn't all that much, and you can only deliver power if you have enough of those vessels to guarantee overlap at the destination or you're going to have to deal with outages. I wonder who is investing in this project.
- seized 3y agoMaybe they plan to swap batteries in and out of the ship, have a rotating set of ten (or whatever) batteries, one discharging, eight charging, load the tenth with a crane, swap out for the discharged one, cycle through...
- jacquesm 3y agoNo, I watched their video and it says the batteries are meant to stay on board.
- mabbo 3y agoWhat exactly happens if even one of those batteries pops?
- thriftwy 3y agoNever overestimate the power throughput of a barge loaded with charged batteries.
- supportengineer 3y agoIf there was ever a case for sails/kites, this is it
- pcurve 3y agoTarget range of 110 miles by 2030. Then 220 miles by 2040. I'm not familiar with global sea route, but I'd imagine use cases for <100 mile route by small cargo ship is limited? Unless the energy density multiplies quickly, it feels more like a vaporware.
- richardjam73 3y agoThe use case is to transfer energy from the main grid on the mainland to an outlying island. Most islands are not that far out.
- RetroHippyNimby 3y agoThis is very interesting, and makes me wonder if it's analogous to the old joke that the highest bandwidth pipe you could get was a semi full of DVDs. I've been curious if someone would eventually run the numbers on something like this to see if it makes economical sense to transmit power in bursts like this.
- Mistletoe 3y agoCan anyone run the math on how many megawatt hours a full oil tanker might be for comparison? https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter4/transportation-and-energy/combustibles-energy-content/ https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter4/transportat... Is the ratio something like this? 41 to 0.5? 82x?
- Manuel_D 3y agoSources say 13.7 MWh of energy per ton of LNG. This is in BTUs so at 60% efficiency of a fairly modern gas plant would yield 8.2MWh of electricity generation potential per ton. The largest LNG carrier carries over 80,000 tons of LNG https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LNG_carrier https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LNG_carrier So that would work out to 656 GWh of electric generation potential for a full load of the largest LNG carrier. More than 2000x the capacity of the battery carrier.
- Schroedingersat 3y agoNow do an LNG tanker the size of a 100TEU feeder ship as an actual comparison.
- defrost 3y agoIndeed, who'd have thought an elephant would be bigger than a mouse. Direct comparison of the largest LNG carrier in existance Vs. early proof of concept "maybe this is worth a shot" vessel isn't especially meaningful. A sensible 'normalised' comparison might be energy carried per displacement kilotonne or some such.
- Schroedingersat 3y agoAnswering the original question, it's about 10-20x as much usable energy for the oil. So if there's a wind farm 5% of the distance than an oil farm, the cost of the ship part is a wash.
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- acidburnNSA 3y agoAbsolutely ridiculous. Run a wire.
- nashashmi 3y agoOr at least microwave energy stations
- iancmceachern 3y agoOr use the energy to disassociate sea water into hydrogen, ship the hydrogen. They're doing this with the Sea Change hydrogen ferry in San Francisco https://www.sfchronicle.com/climate/article/san-francisco-first-fuel-cell-ferry-17804637.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/climate/article/san-francisco-fi...
- acidburnNSA 3y agoIf you want hydrogen for portable power, sure, but I'd you're just trying to move electricity short distances, that calls for a wire.
- defrost 3y agoCan you think of any issues with Japan, its steeply sloping sea surrounds, large number of earthquakes, and hard to access wires on the seafloor? Is it prudent to think about a parallel means of energy transfer that works in the immediate aftermath of another scale 9 earthquake and disaster?
- hettygreen 3y agoI was going to make a snarky comment about how this boat now enables rich countries to exploit desert nations rich in solar-energy.
- thx-2718 3y ago"Currently named "Battery Tanker X," the prototype won't be going very far. Pushing a vessel through draggy water is a nightmare for battery-powered electric propulsion systems, so the ship's maximum range before it burns through too much battery to make the trip economically feasible is slated at just 300 km (186 miles). A full production "Power Ark" the same size, says PowerX, might move about 4,190 GWh of electricity annually from renewable sources in Hokkaido to meet demand in Aomori just 100 km (62 miles) away, making use of transmission infrastructure already in place but soon to be abandoned as fossil fuel-based generation capacity is gradually shut down. " I'm reading a lot of comments seemingly missing these details. Interesting and seems to be useful in Japan's geography that I'm not personally used to thinking about.
- VectorLock 3y agoUsing all of its internal battery for propulsion I wonder how far it could go.
- jsnell 3y agoWhat detail of Japan's geography that's supposed to make this viable did you pick up from that text? Aomori is not some island so remote and isolated they can't possibly run underwater cables to. It's on Honshu. You know, the main island. On the same power grid as Tokio.
- thx-2718 3y ago"making use of transmission infrastructure already in place but soon to be abandoned as fossil fuel-based generation capacity is gradually shut down. " From article: "Why not just put down an underwater cable? That's a fine question. PowerX points out that Japan is surrounded by deep seas, and prone to earthquakes, and says in a press release that "the ship-based solution resolves issues such as long downtime from undersea cable malfunctions and repairs, as well as the high costs associated with ultra-high voltage connections and substations.""
- fomine3 3y ago
- matt3210 3y agoHave it drag a massive detachable trailer that is covered in solar panels.
- swader999 3y agoWonder if compressed air would be a better store on a ship.
- iancmceachern 3y agoThe problem with compressed air power storage is the heat generated from the compression process, you never recover that so the losses are such that the efficiency overall is pretty bad
- jxf 3y agoSneakernet but for electric charge instead of bytes.
- MisterBastahrd 3y agoAnyone want a 500 foot bomb in their port?
- rektide 3y agoI'd love to see something like this (hopefully smaller scale) used for maritime power. Power shipping itself with some semi-roving large power stores. Assuming there's an electrified fleet worth serving seeming like a big challenge. It might probably need to be a bit more modestly sized/scoped. But this idea of large mobile batteries keeps being interesting to me.
- iancmceachern 3y agoIt would be far better to use the energy locally to disassociate sea water and turn it into hydrogen, then ship the hydrogen. They're doing this with the sea change ferry in San Francisco. The hydrogen that it runs on will be created from electricity and seawater at the point if use, on a floating fuel barge. It gets even better, they're using fully green hydroelectric energy from Hetch Hetchy reservoir, so the whole chain is about as green as possible, and is really an example for the rest of the world to follow. https://www.sfchronicle.com/climate/article/san-francisco-first-fuel-cell-ferry-17804637.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/climate/article/san-francisco-fi...
- Schroedingersat 3y agoThe much higher capacity 8000 gross tonne hydrogen carrier can deliver about 1400MWh, after spending 3000MWh filling it up with a bunch of electrolysers then liquifying the hydrogen which you'd have to build a floating platform for. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suiso_Frontier https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suiso_Frontier 8000 tonnes of 200Wh/kg batteries is 1600MWh. This is dumb, but hydrogen is much, much dumber.
- xavieralexandre 3y agoIt looks like someone took the "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway" sneakernet idea literally.