14 ms·

CATL expects oceanic electric ships in three years

156 points by thelastgallon 11mo ago

eimrine 11mo ago
Is it possible for ocean vessel to generate from sun panels as much as needed for moving? I would suggest vessels does not need scarce Lithium, it is too needed for some other uses.
- themanmaran 11mo ago
  Unfortunately, it's not even close. Maybe 1-2% in a highly optimistic scenario. - 20k square meters of hull space - If fully covered with solar panels, on a sunny day, you could expect 1-2 MWh (when averaging in night time) - Current diesel engines typically output 60MWh continuously while underway. And that's not factoring in the solar panels getting covered in salt over time and losing efficiency. Plus preventing the ship from actually loading / unloading cargo efficiently. It's not just a matter of panel efficiency either. If we had magic panels that could absorb 100% of the suns power over the 20k sqm deck, it would only equate to about four times as much (8% of the overall power need).
  - tshaddox 11mo ago
    Did you mean MW rather than MWh?
    - probablypower 11mo ago
      60 MWh continuously means inf MW.
      - SigmundA 11mo ago
        60 MWh continuous is nonsense because its a unit of energy, 60 MWh per hour is just 60 megawatts, 60 MWh per second however is 216 gigawatts.
    - themanmaran 11mo ago
      Yea mixed up my units in a couple places. Should be: - Solar: 1–2 MW of average power; ~24–48 MWh of energy per day. - Diesel: about 60 MW of mechanical power while underway; ~1,440 MWh of energy per day.
  - SigmundA 11mo ago
    Your math seem to work out, but I don't like the incoherent use if energy units. 60 MWh per what? Per hour? thats just 60 MW continuous POWER or 1440 MWh ENERGY per day.
- ta9000 11mo ago
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- rgmerk 11mo ago
  No. I’m too lazy to do it myself but 5 minutes of searching and calculating will show you that the area of solar panels required to move a ship is far, far, larger than the area of that ship. Not to mention that a container ship’s deck is typically completely covered with, well, containers. Also, lithium isn’t scarce.
  - g-b-r 11mo ago
    > Not to mention that a container ship’s deck is typically completely covered with, well, containers. I guess in theory that could be solved either with huge removable panels around the containers (to be "put aside" somewhere during the loading operations), or placing containers with solar panels (and ways to deliver the energy to the ship) on the outer sides of the cargo. Actually, maybe the batteries themselves could be loaded as containers on the sides of the cargo, with solar panels on them; that might increase the risk for the cargo if some catch fire, though But, I guess it wouldn't be worthwhile.
- Onavo 11mo ago
  No, but with wind it's possible. Either vertical windmills or sails with modern signal processing. Honestly DJI and Boeing should get into this business. A boat's sail basically a plane's wing, aerodynamically speaking. They share a lot of similarities with endurance gliders.
  - bluGill 11mo ago
    Plenty of engineers exist in sailing who know all that and have studied this. Boeing brings nothing new if they get in. Well other than perhaps dollars, but that isn't the problem for the most part.
  - throw-qqqqq 11mo ago
    Smaller boats sure, but ocean going cargo vessels? There are some serious challenges! Try to approximate the area needed to generate e.g. 50MW propulsion. It would be measured in hectares.
- epistasis 11mo ago
  Lithium is not scarce, and not a limiting factor for scaling up batteries. There's more than enough lithium out there, more discovered every month, and the perception that we are limited by lithium is mostly out there because certain media sources are trying to help out there fossil fuel friends by delaying the energy interchange by a few years. Whether battery ocean shipping containers make technical sense is a different question, but I wouldn't worry about lithium use!
  - jiggawatts 11mo ago
    All resources are "scarce" at very low price points, below which most nations are unable or unwilling to extract them. Lithium, rare earth metals, and a bunch of others are only "scarce" because right now China is the only country willing to put up with the pollution levels that the cheap, dirty version of their extraction produces. Everything can be produced cleanly, safely, etc... but that comes at a price. It's like when employers complain that "nobody wants to work". That needs to be translated to "nobody wants to work for the low wages I'm willing to pay".
  - dalyons 11mo ago
    By the time we get around to building these it would likely be sodium ion anyway
  - tim333 11mo ago
    Maybe not scarce in an absolute sense but what about whether there is a spare million tons lying around to make ship batteries?
    - epistasis 11mo ago
      What's more scarce is the factory capacity to build the batteries, and the scale of their supply chains. But even that is expanding by 10x every five years. We are currently building more than a TWh per year of batteries. If there is demand for batteries in ships, it is going to be far smaller than for cars, which is currently 80% of battery demand (the rest is mostly grid storage). So ship batteries will at most slow the fall of battery pricing by a small amount.
- givemeethekeys 11mo ago
  There are examples of solar electric catamarans - but they are much smaller than a cargo vessel. It's not nothing, but we're some ways away. I wouldn't underestimate what creative and dedicated engineers can accomplish.
- fulafel 11mo ago
  Yes, but it would move very slowly compared to current freight ships, think an order of magnitude lower average speed. (You can compromise on the freight features to get some more speed of course, but it's still going to be slower unless you do something dramatic like fly a huge PV array as a kite or something) Besides PV, there's a long history of wind powered ships of course.
zeristor 11mo ago
Cars have regenerative breaking which is a help in urban areas. Ships tend to go not change course nearly as much on a several day journey. I guess a propellor could run in reverse for regenerative breaking, but it wouldn’t help much.
- dyauspitr 11mo ago
  Wind, large surface area for solar Also wave based generators that could also act as dampers/suspension and they wouldn’t steal energy from forward motion like wind would (depending on if you’re generating wind energy or using wind to buttress the batteries). Ideally a combination of sails coupled with batteries and wave generators sounds like it would be very energy efficient.
  - jacquesm 11mo ago
    Solar on board of cargo vessels is a pipe dream, as is 'wave based generation'.
- tmountain 11mo ago
  Isn’t regenerative braking reclaiming otherwise wasted energy from necessary deceleration? Running the propeller in reverse would result in having to apply equal or greater energy to regain the current speed, so it’s a net loss of energy if I’m understanding the suggestion properly.
- jacquesm 11mo ago
  Ships are subject to so much drag that this is rarely a problem, only in emergency situations and there is not much that you can do to stop a vessel that weighs 100,000 tons or more except to run your engines in reverse and start praying to your deity. Regenerative braking for boats would be a complete waste. There are some vessels that have single use emergency brakes, but the latest trend is to have motor 'pods' that are electrical and that can be used both for normal propulsion as well as to perform emergency stops that are quite impressive given the size of the vessels they are on. Typically an oceangoing vessel requires at least 3, but commonly 5 to 10 ship lengths to come to a full stop from moving forward under power. This is not necessarily because of limitations of the propulsion unit, but simply because stopping that much tonnage too fast would do as much damage as a collision would. With classical engines there is far more rotating mass so it would take much longer than with electrical propulsion to react before the beginning of the braking phase.
56J8XhH7voFRwPR 11mo ago
I guess I want to know "oceanic" means in this instance. Is that just going out into the ocean a short distance? They mention the "Yangtze River Three Gorges 1" river cruise ship as an example. This thing has a range of like 100km. It seems we are far away from making true oceanic crossings of any long distance and I doubt that is coming by 2028.
- Animats 11mo ago
  East Asia has extensive coastal medium-distance trade. There are so many islands and island nations. That's oceanic trade, but not transatlantic or trans-pacific long hauls.
  - antonkochubey 11mo ago
    Those small islands also don’t have any infrastructure to recharge such ships. The small ones often struggle even to serve their own needs.
    - matthewdgreen 11mo ago
      I would expect that building out electric fueling points throughout Asia will be a big infrastructure investment over the next few years.
    - Animats 11mo ago
      Islands. As in Japan, Taiwan, Okinawa, Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, New Guinea, and for practical purposes, Australia. All of which rely on medium-haul sea traffic.
- ta9000 11mo ago
  If it were Elon Musk saying it, I’d agree, but this is CATL. They actually do the work.
  - lostlogin 11mo ago
    Fully autonomous cargo shipping is coming with the next update.
mcculley 11mo ago
I am very skeptical. Battery tech is still far away from the energy density of diesel fuel. How far could an electric ship go and what could it carry?
- jacquesm 11mo ago
  There are multiple electric ferries already in operation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Ampere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Ampere They are quite impressive but they are still very far away from your average ocean going cargo vessel.
  - toast0 11mo ago
    Electrifying ferries is great, but this particular one has a run time of 20 minutes (and a charge time of 10 minutes). I get a totally different vibe from 'oceanic ship' than a 20 minute ferry ride. Near me, we now have a hybrid ferry, no charging infrastructure, but it still uses much less fuel than before it was refit, so that's cool too. It's bigger than the one you linked and sails on a longer route: 2,499 passengers, 202 vehicles, typically serves an 8.6 mile route. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Wenatchee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Wenatchee
    - jacquesm 11mo ago
      Absolutely, but that's how this starts. Boats too started as ferries, it took many, many years before boats purposefully went into blue water. Ferries are a great testbed, they have lots of cycles and they are a pre-cursor to coastal and then eventually larger ocean going vessels, which I predict will go diesel-electric before they go all electric.
      - jabl 11mo ago
        > eventually larger ocean going vessels, which I predict will go diesel-electric before they go all electric. Diesel-electric, particularly when using Azipods, is great when you need to do a lot of maneuvering in narrow spaces like ports. But for long-haul it's hard to beat the economics of a two-stroke direct drive diesel. Maybe a hybrid concept for a long-haul ship would be using a direct drive two-stroke main engine, but the auxiliary diesels replaced by batteries?
jmward01 11mo ago
I did some fast back of the napkin math on the idea of sahara solar + electrified shipping + sodium ion batteries. A lot depends on the, as yet, fully disclosed pricing of sodium ion batteries but the trend in pricing, and capacity, is clear and the price point may have already happened to make this viable. One thing is clear though, even if my napkin math was massively optimistic and it isn't economically feasible now it will be shortly and at that point energy production around the world is potentially disrupted. Ships can pull in and feed the grid directly or offload containers and onload empty ones to make the trip back for cheap, clean, renewable power. It is looking more and more viable to ship electrons like we do for oil and that is a major game-changer.
- idontwantthis 11mo ago
  That's both amazing and hilarious just like filling a plane with hard drives is both insanely effective and just plain insane.
  - manquer 11mo ago
    AWS Snowmobile exists , I wouldn’t call filling a truck (or a plane) with hard disks insane .
    - eichin 11mo ago
      mmm, it was discontinued in 2024 - so maybe amazon decided it was insane (well, insufficiently economic?) after all?
      - manquer 11mo ago
        Less demand these days, In 2015 when it launched there was lot more drive to move to the cloud, lift and shift was the industry mantra. By 2024 the kind of orgs with >100 PB have already moved to cloud or have no plans to do so. The current solution is we can bring our own devices and reserve ports on a AWS Data Transfer Terminal. It costs $300-500/hour USD for a 100 GbE bandwidth so not really cheap. While AWS is stopping doing devices for migration (not economical at low volumes these days). They however still support physical transfers so customers can pack their own planes so to speak with hard disks to the AWS terminal.
jauco 11mo ago
We already have electric oceanic ships. They’re called nuclear submarines. Allseas is putting the reactors on their vessels as well iirc.
- foota 11mo ago
  While perhaps not practical for oceanic shipping as is, it's a fun exercise to demonstrate the energy density of nuclear power.
- matthewdgreen 11mo ago
  US nuclear submarines consume highly-enriched uranium, that's nearly as (and sometimes more) pure as the weapons-grade version. That doesn't mean oceanic reactors aren't possible, it just means that military subs are a bad example.
  - manquer 11mo ago
    There are nuclear icebreakers. Nuclear powered non military ships do exist, it just not economically feasible .
    - leosarev 11mo ago
      Much more economically feasible than battery powered ones.
      - ok_dad 11mo ago
        Prove it.
        leosarev 11mo ago
        There are operating nuclear powered ocean vessels for decades.
        manquer 11mo ago
rgmerk 11mo ago
OK, I did some calculations based on: * a 5,000 km electric range. * 40MW continuous power requirement for a 21.5 knot cruise speed[1] for a 14000 teu container vessel: * the size and weight capacity for the batteries being the same as the fuel capacity for a 14000 teu container vessel (taking the upper figure from [2]) * the battery pack having similar gravimetric (weight) and volumetric(size) energy density as this a modern Chinese NMC EV pack[3] The short version is that the battery vessel would require about 25,000 tonnes of batteries for a 5,000km range under those assumptions, which compares to the current fuel capacity of approximately 13,000 tonnes. Volumetrically, it's even closer - about 17,000 cubic metres, compared to about 13,000 for the bunker fuel. Furthermore, it's worth considering just how much cargo the ship carries. One teu corresponds to about 33 cubic metres of cargo space (not counting the space taken up by the walls of the container), so the ship can carry about 462,000 cubic metres of cargo. So the additional space required to carry an additional 3,500-odd cubic metres of batteries corresponds to only about 0.8% of the ship's total cargo-carrying capacity. I was surprised at just how doable this is, to be honest. What threw me is just how much bunker fuel ships can carry; if I'm doing the sums right, a ship like this can carry enough fuel to circumnavigate the globe a couple of times over. It may well make economic sense but it's not really necessary to have that kind of range to operate the ship safely. [1]https://www.man-es.com/docs/default-source/marine/tools/propulsion-of-14-000-teu-new-panamax-container-vessel.pdf?sfvrsn=58b2c2_14 https://www.man-es.com/docs/default-source/marine/tools/prop... [2]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... [3]https://www.batterydesign.net/zeekr-140kwh-catl-qilin/ https://www.batterydesign.net/zeekr-140kwh-catl-qilin/
- colechristensen 11mo ago
  The recharging infrastructure for such a vessel would be an interesting challenge. Likewise if those batteries caught fire.
  - manquer 11mo ago
    No need do charge in-situ, the ships (and ports) already transfer several times the battery volume and weight on berthing quickly . The battery systems could be designed to leverage that . Fire hazards are there for any fuel, Safety systems evolve to handle them. The environmental impact would be more localized than an oil spill.
thelastgallon 11mo ago
I wonder if nuclear containerships can be developed and have enough power to pull a train of containerships.
- deleted 11mo ago
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- leosarev 11mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sevmorput https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sevmorput
- andbberger 11mo ago
  certainly there exist nuclear ships with enough power but I fail to see how you would feasibly tug a train of containerships
ggm 11mo ago
Ships sail at the cost of static resistance in water. Larger ships are more efficient, once buoyant. There is a New Scientist story about a guy on guard duty moving a moored navy boat by leaning on it, for a long period of time. TL;DR marine is the one niche where "we had to make it a lot bigger to hold the batteries" isn't actually a big deal. If you do this the right way, you still have heaps of volume for cargo, and solar cells on the hold covers.
j16sdiz 11mo ago
This is overly optimistic. If you expect _oceanic_ ships in 3 year, you need to start building infrastructure today, in multiple ports. If you need to build those infrastructure today, you need to have something standardize. otoh, if all you want are just some prototypes, we have them today already..
mahrain 11mo ago
It would be amazing if they could leverage the container system, but instead of goods, there'd be battery containers they could just plug in to the ship. You could even charge a battery container somewhere and bring it in by (electrified) rail.
- pbmonster 11mo ago
  If we ever end up doing that it would mean terrible things for the state of our regulatory landscape. A completely optimized high capacity cargo rail line can move 500 rail cars per hour. That's 1000 FEUs if we double stack containers. A lithium battery system in a FEU has around 2 MWh of storage. So that rail line has 2 GW transmission capacity if we saturate it with batteries - the same as a single high voltage transmission line. Being unable to build one of those in parallel to the rail line would be extremely sad. Note that 500 rail cars per hour is actually an impressive feat of logistics. A normal rail yard at a port would be very happy with a sustained rate of 200 rail cars per hour, and will frequently drop below that.
tarokun33 11mo ago
For a vessel the size of a container ship, mounting an SMR (Small Modular Reactor) directly to power it would likely result in less energy loss.
- cenamus 11mo ago
  Not even the Russians could decommission their nuclear subs properly. I'm relatively sure that random semi-shading shipping companies wouldn't either. In a perfect world however... endless cooling water unless they're in some shallow harbor. Would be the perfect application.
  - mschuster91 11mo ago
    > In a perfect world however... endless cooling water unless they're in some shallow harbor. Would be the perfect application. Still not, because all it takes is one thing going Seriously Fucking Wrong on another ship and boom, you got yourself a nuclear disaster. Just look at the Francis Scott Key Bridge and imagine that that ship hadn't hit a bridge support but a nuclear powered vessel. Nuclear powered ships only make sense for ships operating in places where there is no other ship in sight for hundreds of miles (i.e. icebreakers) or for military ships that can and will shoot and sink anything with the potential of becoming a threat.
    - cenamus 11mo ago
      And floating power plants I suppose. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_floating_nuclear_power_station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_floating_nuclear_power...
- ViewTrick1002 11mo ago
  But an extremely expensive crew to run it coupled with extremely high CAPEX. Even navies are moving away from nuclear power due to how expensive it is.
- HdS84 11mo ago
  The germans tried that in the 60s see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Hahn_(ship) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Hahn_(ship). It was uneconomical. You need specialized engineers for that, you need special permissions for ports and the important canals are off limits due to risk.
jillesvangurp 11mo ago
Here's some back of the envelope math for batteries and ships: - Weight is less of a limitation than you would think. Ship size is measured in tonnage. 40K-60K is a medium sized cargo carrying ship. So lets assume a ship like that. - Battery weight calculations are going to be key. If you assume 170 wh/kg, 6 tonnes of battery equals about 1 mwh of battery. - Energy usage of ships is speed dependent and it's a non linear relationship. You can save a lot of energy by going a bit slower. Going about 15 knots, a ship like this might use 15mw of power. So the math becomes something like 6 x 15 = 90 tons of battery per hour. 5000km is about 2700 nautical miles (1 knot == 1 nautical mile/hour). So, you need about 180 hours of battery. Or about 16200 tons for a total of 15mwh x 180 = 2.7gwh of energy. That's a big battery. The real limitation here comes from the cost of the batteries, which is dropping fast with sodium ion. The reason CATL is bringing this up is because they've been doing similar math with some informed $/kwh math. If they can get it down to around 20$/kwh, a mwh would cost 20K, and a gwh would cost 20M. So the battery would cost 54M$. The key here is that this is still assuming 15knots. Energy usage might drop considerably if you drop it to 10 knots or even lower. You might only need 7200 tons of battery at those speeds. The ship can handle the weight either way, though you are sacrificing useful load of course. The real constraints here are cost and speed. You pay a fat premium for a fast ship. Of course ships this size aren't cheap. A few tens of millions is normal. And they burn through many millions worth of fuel per year too. So, even though that amount of battery is expensive, the math might actually work out to these ships being cheap enough to operate that they'd earn back their battery. You'd have to be pretty bullish about cost and performance of batteries. But CATL clearly feels that way. They have several battery chemistries at their disposal with higher densities (and cost). Over time, batteries might get cheaper and more dense. Ship designs might be optimized for batteries (e.g. structural hulls with battery). There's a lot of wiggle room here. But it's not an impossible proposition.
- deleted 11mo ago
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- pzo 11mo ago
  I think another problem is how fast you will be able to charge such a huge battery and how expensive such ship battery charger will be and if you expect to have such charger at most ports (ideally for every docked ship). Will you even need a power plant at every port?
Havoc 11mo ago
I guess if it works for cars then boats should too
simgt 11mo ago
Sails [0] [1] [2] are obviously more sustainable than the gigantic industry needed around batteries this size. That'd of course massively increase the cost of shipping and suddenly producing most things locally would make more economical sense. Bye bye £2 jeans from Shein. [0] https://www.towt.eu/en/home/ https://www.towt.eu/en/home/ [1] https://www.neoline.eu/ https://www.neoline.eu/ [2] https://graindesail.com/fr/voilier-cargo-grain-de-sail-3/ https://graindesail.com/fr/voilier-cargo-grain-de-sail-3/
- HPsquared 11mo ago
  I wonder how much the jeans would cost if the price of shipping (i.e. the cost per container ocean mile) were to double.
  - tralarpa 11mo ago
    I searched a little bit and found these numbers for t-shirts in a 20 foot container: - Shipping container from China to the US: $3000-$9000 (tariffs?) - Number of t-shirts per container: 35000 How much heavier are jeans than t-shirts? 10 times? That would mean an increase of $2.50 if container shipping costs double.
    - simgt 11mo ago
      I think the volume is what defines the cost for cargo shipping so your 10x is likely pessimistic. $2.50 is both significant relative to the price of one these jeans and not much compared to what has been the expected cost of a pair for decades. It says more about how dirt cheap shipping is the single enabler of globalization, even doubling the cost may not be enough to significantly shorten the supply chains.
- nasmorn 11mo ago
  Sorry this makes zero sense. The low price of shipping comes from the huge size of ships. All these 100% sailing ventures are just so someone can sell you gourmet coffee with a nice story at outrageous prices
Neil44 11mo ago
Since there is a lot of space out there in the ocean I wonder if some kind of big floating energy station could be a thing, using middle of the ocean wind, tidal or solar. I guess you don't have to pay anyone for the space or worry about too many regulations etc.
- GJim 11mo ago
  > I wonder if some kind of big floating energy station could be a thing Congratulations, you have just re-invented offshore (floating) wind turbines. https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ftsa&q=floating+wind+turbines+&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ftsa&q=floating+wind+turbines+&ia=... > I guess you don't have to pay anyone for the space or worry about too many regulations etc. I'm ammused you think offshore energy is lawless. It's the same assumption that had the entire maritime community laughing at the clowns behind 'Seasteding" and the amusing MS Satoshi 'cryptoship'.
  - Neil44 11mo ago
    I found your reply unnecessarily snarky. The possibility I'l pondering would be to have a facility in deep ocean, far away from any countries coastline, but near shipping lanes.
- LikeBeans 11mo ago
  I like your idea. We can now generate substantial amount of power from floating wind turbines. Coupled with floating batteries (ie on cargo ships) we perhaps build floating charging stations along major shipping routes. There is no need for nuclear or to only charge at ports. Would it work?
api 11mo ago
The US with its sunk cost and political power base in fossil fuels is losing the innovators dilemma at a large scale here.
LikeBeans 11mo ago
Clusters of floating wind turbines each with their own battery storage might be useful here. I imagine along strategic (ie major) shipping channels. Would it pencil out? I have no idea.
- LikeBeans 11mo ago
  Actually thinking about it some more why not park a couple of dozen older cargo ships along major shipping route. Equip them with wind turbines and batteries in shipping containers. Now the actual cargo ships passing by can stop for a few hours, plug in and charge. Use sodium ion batteries that can support thousands of cycles. Even use regular fuel as a backup in the charging ships. You can build and maintain anywhere and then haul them to the right location.
throw0101d 11mo ago
Hybrid propulsion is already a thing in the marine world (often in navy/military designs): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_diesel–electric_and_gas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_diesel–electric_and_g... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_diesel–electric_and_diesel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_diesel–electric_and_d... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_electric_propulsion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_electric_propulsion

156 points by thelastgallon 11mo ago

Is it possible for ocean vessel to generate from sun panels as much as needed for moving? I would suggest vessels does not need scarce Lithium, it is too needed for some other uses.

themanmaran 11mo ago
Unfortunately, it's not even close. Maybe 1-2% in a highly optimistic scenario. - 20k square meters of hull space - If fully covered with solar panels, on a sunny day, you could expect 1-2 MWh (when averaging in night time) - Current diesel engines typically output 60MWh continuously while underway. And that's not factoring in the solar panels getting covered in salt over time and losing efficiency. Plus preventing the ship from actually loading / unloading cargo efficiently. It's not just a matter of panel efficiency either. If we had magic panels that could absorb 100% of the suns power over the 20k sqm deck, it would only equate to about four times as much (8% of the overall power need).
- tshaddox 11mo ago
  Did you mean MW rather than MWh?
  - probablypower 11mo ago
    60 MWh continuously means inf MW.
    - SigmundA 11mo ago
      60 MWh continuous is nonsense because its a unit of energy, 60 MWh per hour is just 60 megawatts, 60 MWh per second however is 216 gigawatts.
  - themanmaran 11mo ago
    Yea mixed up my units in a couple places. Should be: - Solar: 1–2 MW of average power; ~24–48 MWh of energy per day. - Diesel: about 60 MW of mechanical power while underway; ~1,440 MWh of energy per day.
- SigmundA 11mo ago
  Your math seem to work out, but I don't like the incoherent use if energy units. 60 MWh per what? Per hour? thats just 60 MW continuous POWER or 1440 MWh ENERGY per day.
ta9000 11mo ago
[dead]
rgmerk 11mo ago
No. I’m too lazy to do it myself but 5 minutes of searching and calculating will show you that the area of solar panels required to move a ship is far, far, larger than the area of that ship. Not to mention that a container ship’s deck is typically completely covered with, well, containers. Also, lithium isn’t scarce.
- g-b-r 11mo ago
  > Not to mention that a container ship’s deck is typically completely covered with, well, containers. I guess in theory that could be solved either with huge removable panels around the containers (to be "put aside" somewhere during the loading operations), or placing containers with solar panels (and ways to deliver the energy to the ship) on the outer sides of the cargo. Actually, maybe the batteries themselves could be loaded as containers on the sides of the cargo, with solar panels on them; that might increase the risk for the cargo if some catch fire, though But, I guess it wouldn't be worthwhile.
Onavo 11mo ago
No, but with wind it's possible. Either vertical windmills or sails with modern signal processing. Honestly DJI and Boeing should get into this business. A boat's sail basically a plane's wing, aerodynamically speaking. They share a lot of similarities with endurance gliders.
- bluGill 11mo ago
  Plenty of engineers exist in sailing who know all that and have studied this. Boeing brings nothing new if they get in. Well other than perhaps dollars, but that isn't the problem for the most part.
- throw-qqqqq 11mo ago
  Smaller boats sure, but ocean going cargo vessels? There are some serious challenges! Try to approximate the area needed to generate e.g. 50MW propulsion. It would be measured in hectares.
epistasis 11mo ago
Lithium is not scarce, and not a limiting factor for scaling up batteries. There's more than enough lithium out there, more discovered every month, and the perception that we are limited by lithium is mostly out there because certain media sources are trying to help out there fossil fuel friends by delaying the energy interchange by a few years. Whether battery ocean shipping containers make technical sense is a different question, but I wouldn't worry about lithium use!
- jiggawatts 11mo ago
  All resources are "scarce" at very low price points, below which most nations are unable or unwilling to extract them. Lithium, rare earth metals, and a bunch of others are only "scarce" because right now China is the only country willing to put up with the pollution levels that the cheap, dirty version of their extraction produces. Everything can be produced cleanly, safely, etc... but that comes at a price. It's like when employers complain that "nobody wants to work". That needs to be translated to "nobody wants to work for the low wages I'm willing to pay".
- dalyons 11mo ago
  By the time we get around to building these it would likely be sodium ion anyway
- tim333 11mo ago
  Maybe not scarce in an absolute sense but what about whether there is a spare million tons lying around to make ship batteries?
  - epistasis 11mo ago
    What's more scarce is the factory capacity to build the batteries, and the scale of their supply chains. But even that is expanding by 10x every five years. We are currently building more than a TWh per year of batteries. If there is demand for batteries in ships, it is going to be far smaller than for cars, which is currently 80% of battery demand (the rest is mostly grid storage). So ship batteries will at most slow the fall of battery pricing by a small amount.
givemeethekeys 11mo ago
There are examples of solar electric catamarans - but they are much smaller than a cargo vessel. It's not nothing, but we're some ways away. I wouldn't underestimate what creative and dedicated engineers can accomplish.
fulafel 11mo ago
Yes, but it would move very slowly compared to current freight ships, think an order of magnitude lower average speed. (You can compromise on the freight features to get some more speed of course, but it's still going to be slower unless you do something dramatic like fly a huge PV array as a kite or something) Besides PV, there's a long history of wind powered ships of course.

zeristor 11mo ago

Cars have regenerative breaking which is a help in urban areas. Ships tend to go not change course nearly as much on a several day journey. I guess a propellor could run in reverse for regenerative breaking, but it wouldn’t help much.

dyauspitr 11mo ago
Wind, large surface area for solar Also wave based generators that could also act as dampers/suspension and they wouldn’t steal energy from forward motion like wind would (depending on if you’re generating wind energy or using wind to buttress the batteries). Ideally a combination of sails coupled with batteries and wave generators sounds like it would be very energy efficient.
- jacquesm 11mo ago
  Solar on board of cargo vessels is a pipe dream, as is 'wave based generation'.
tmountain 11mo ago
Isn’t regenerative braking reclaiming otherwise wasted energy from necessary deceleration? Running the propeller in reverse would result in having to apply equal or greater energy to regain the current speed, so it’s a net loss of energy if I’m understanding the suggestion properly.
jacquesm 11mo ago
Ships are subject to so much drag that this is rarely a problem, only in emergency situations and there is not much that you can do to stop a vessel that weighs 100,000 tons or more except to run your engines in reverse and start praying to your deity. Regenerative braking for boats would be a complete waste. There are some vessels that have single use emergency brakes, but the latest trend is to have motor 'pods' that are electrical and that can be used both for normal propulsion as well as to perform emergency stops that are quite impressive given the size of the vessels they are on. Typically an oceangoing vessel requires at least 3, but commonly 5 to 10 ship lengths to come to a full stop from moving forward under power. This is not necessarily because of limitations of the propulsion unit, but simply because stopping that much tonnage too fast would do as much damage as a collision would. With classical engines there is far more rotating mass so it would take much longer than with electrical propulsion to react before the beginning of the braking phase.

56J8XhH7voFRwPR 11mo ago

I guess I want to know "oceanic" means in this instance. Is that just going out into the ocean a short distance? They mention the "Yangtze River Three Gorges 1" river cruise ship as an example. This thing has a range of like 100km. It seems we are far away from making true oceanic crossings of any long distance and I doubt that is coming by 2028.

Animats 11mo ago
East Asia has extensive coastal medium-distance trade. There are so many islands and island nations. That's oceanic trade, but not transatlantic or trans-pacific long hauls.
- antonkochubey 11mo ago
  Those small islands also don’t have any infrastructure to recharge such ships. The small ones often struggle even to serve their own needs.
  - matthewdgreen 11mo ago
    I would expect that building out electric fueling points throughout Asia will be a big infrastructure investment over the next few years.
  - Animats 11mo ago
    Islands. As in Japan, Taiwan, Okinawa, Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, New Guinea, and for practical purposes, Australia. All of which rely on medium-haul sea traffic.
ta9000 11mo ago
If it were Elon Musk saying it, I’d agree, but this is CATL. They actually do the work.
- lostlogin 11mo ago
  Fully autonomous cargo shipping is coming with the next update.

mcculley 11mo ago

I am very skeptical. Battery tech is still far away from the energy density of diesel fuel. How far could an electric ship go and what could it carry?

jacquesm 11mo ago
There are multiple electric ferries already in operation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Ampere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Ampere They are quite impressive but they are still very far away from your average ocean going cargo vessel.
- toast0 11mo ago
  Electrifying ferries is great, but this particular one has a run time of 20 minutes (and a charge time of 10 minutes). I get a totally different vibe from 'oceanic ship' than a 20 minute ferry ride. Near me, we now have a hybrid ferry, no charging infrastructure, but it still uses much less fuel than before it was refit, so that's cool too. It's bigger than the one you linked and sails on a longer route: 2,499 passengers, 202 vehicles, typically serves an 8.6 mile route. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Wenatchee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Wenatchee
  - jacquesm 11mo ago
    Absolutely, but that's how this starts. Boats too started as ferries, it took many, many years before boats purposefully went into blue water. Ferries are a great testbed, they have lots of cycles and they are a pre-cursor to coastal and then eventually larger ocean going vessels, which I predict will go diesel-electric before they go all electric.
    - jabl 11mo ago
      > eventually larger ocean going vessels, which I predict will go diesel-electric before they go all electric. Diesel-electric, particularly when using Azipods, is great when you need to do a lot of maneuvering in narrow spaces like ports. But for long-haul it's hard to beat the economics of a two-stroke direct drive diesel. Maybe a hybrid concept for a long-haul ship would be using a direct drive two-stroke main engine, but the auxiliary diesels replaced by batteries?

jmward01 11mo ago

I did some fast back of the napkin math on the idea of sahara solar + electrified shipping + sodium ion batteries. A lot depends on the, as yet, fully disclosed pricing of sodium ion batteries but the trend in pricing, and capacity, is clear and the price point may have already happened to make this viable. One thing is clear though, even if my napkin math was massively optimistic and it isn't economically feasible now it will be shortly and at that point energy production around the world is potentially disrupted. Ships can pull in and feed the grid directly or offload containers and onload empty ones to make the trip back for cheap, clean, renewable power. It is looking more and more viable to ship electrons like we do for oil and that is a major game-changer.

idontwantthis 11mo ago
That's both amazing and hilarious just like filling a plane with hard drives is both insanely effective and just plain insane.
- manquer 11mo ago
  AWS Snowmobile exists , I wouldn’t call filling a truck (or a plane) with hard disks insane .
  - eichin 11mo ago
    mmm, it was discontinued in 2024 - so maybe amazon decided it was insane (well, insufficiently economic?) after all?
    - manquer 11mo ago
      Less demand these days, In 2015 when it launched there was lot more drive to move to the cloud, lift and shift was the industry mantra. By 2024 the kind of orgs with >100 PB have already moved to cloud or have no plans to do so. The current solution is we can bring our own devices and reserve ports on a AWS Data Transfer Terminal. It costs $300-500/hour USD for a 100 GbE bandwidth so not really cheap. While AWS is stopping doing devices for migration (not economical at low volumes these days). They however still support physical transfers so customers can pack their own planes so to speak with hard disks to the AWS terminal.

jauco 11mo ago

We already have electric oceanic ships. They’re called nuclear submarines. Allseas is putting the reactors on their vessels as well iirc.

foota 11mo ago
While perhaps not practical for oceanic shipping as is, it's a fun exercise to demonstrate the energy density of nuclear power.
matthewdgreen 11mo ago
US nuclear submarines consume highly-enriched uranium, that's nearly as (and sometimes more) pure as the weapons-grade version. That doesn't mean oceanic reactors aren't possible, it just means that military subs are a bad example.
- manquer 11mo ago
  There are nuclear icebreakers. Nuclear powered non military ships do exist, it just not economically feasible .
  - leosarev 11mo ago
    Much more economically feasible than battery powered ones.
    - ok_dad 11mo ago
      Prove it.
      - leosarev 11mo ago
        There are operating nuclear powered ocean vessels for decades.
        manquer 11mo ago

rgmerk 11mo ago

OK, I did some calculations based on: * a 5,000 km electric range. * 40MW continuous power requirement for a 21.5 knot cruise speed[1] for a 14000 teu container vessel: * the size and weight capacity for the batteries being the same as the fuel capacity for a 14000 teu container vessel (taking the upper figure from [2]) * the battery pack having similar gravimetric (weight) and volumetric(size) energy density as this a modern Chinese NMC EV pack[3] The short version is that the battery vessel would require about 25,000 tonnes of batteries for a 5,000km range under those assumptions, which compares to the current fuel capacity of approximately 13,000 tonnes. Volumetrically, it's even closer - about 17,000 cubic metres, compared to about 13,000 for the bunker fuel. Furthermore, it's worth considering just how much cargo the ship carries. One teu corresponds to about 33 cubic metres of cargo space (not counting the space taken up by the walls of the container), so the ship can carry about 462,000 cubic metres of cargo. So the additional space required to carry an additional 3,500-odd cubic metres of batteries corresponds to only about 0.8% of the ship's total cargo-carrying capacity. I was surprised at just how doable this is, to be honest. What threw me is just how much bunker fuel ships can carry; if I'm doing the sums right, a ship like this can carry enough fuel to circumnavigate the globe a couple of times over. It may well make economic sense but it's not really necessary to have that kind of range to operate the ship safely. [1]https://www.man-es.com/docs/default-source/marine/tools/propulsion-of-14-000-teu-new-panamax-container-vessel.pdf?sfvrsn=58b2c2_14 https://www.man-es.com/docs/default-source/marine/tools/prop... [2]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... [3]https://www.batterydesign.net/zeekr-140kwh-catl-qilin/ https://www.batterydesign.net/zeekr-140kwh-catl-qilin/

colechristensen 11mo ago
The recharging infrastructure for such a vessel would be an interesting challenge. Likewise if those batteries caught fire.
- manquer 11mo ago
  No need do charge in-situ, the ships (and ports) already transfer several times the battery volume and weight on berthing quickly . The battery systems could be designed to leverage that . Fire hazards are there for any fuel, Safety systems evolve to handle them. The environmental impact would be more localized than an oil spill.

thelastgallon 11mo ago

I wonder if nuclear containerships can be developed and have enough power to pull a train of containerships.

deleted 11mo ago
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leosarev 11mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sevmorput https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sevmorput
andbberger 11mo ago
certainly there exist nuclear ships with enough power but I fail to see how you would feasibly tug a train of containerships

ggm 11mo ago

Ships sail at the cost of static resistance in water. Larger ships are more efficient, once buoyant. There is a New Scientist story about a guy on guard duty moving a moored navy boat by leaning on it, for a long period of time. TL;DR marine is the one niche where "we had to make it a lot bigger to hold the batteries" isn't actually a big deal. If you do this the right way, you still have heaps of volume for cargo, and solar cells on the hold covers.

j16sdiz 11mo ago

This is overly optimistic. If you expect _oceanic_ ships in 3 year, you need to start building infrastructure today, in multiple ports. If you need to build those infrastructure today, you need to have something standardize. otoh, if all you want are just some prototypes, we have them today already..

mahrain 11mo ago

It would be amazing if they could leverage the container system, but instead of goods, there'd be battery containers they could just plug in to the ship. You could even charge a battery container somewhere and bring it in by (electrified) rail.

pbmonster 11mo ago
If we ever end up doing that it would mean terrible things for the state of our regulatory landscape. A completely optimized high capacity cargo rail line can move 500 rail cars per hour. That's 1000 FEUs if we double stack containers. A lithium battery system in a FEU has around 2 MWh of storage. So that rail line has 2 GW transmission capacity if we saturate it with batteries - the same as a single high voltage transmission line. Being unable to build one of those in parallel to the rail line would be extremely sad. Note that 500 rail cars per hour is actually an impressive feat of logistics. A normal rail yard at a port would be very happy with a sustained rate of 200 rail cars per hour, and will frequently drop below that.

tarokun33 11mo ago

For a vessel the size of a container ship, mounting an SMR (Small Modular Reactor) directly to power it would likely result in less energy loss.

cenamus 11mo ago
Not even the Russians could decommission their nuclear subs properly. I'm relatively sure that random semi-shading shipping companies wouldn't either. In a perfect world however... endless cooling water unless they're in some shallow harbor. Would be the perfect application.
- mschuster91 11mo ago
  > In a perfect world however... endless cooling water unless they're in some shallow harbor. Would be the perfect application. Still not, because all it takes is one thing going Seriously Fucking Wrong on another ship and boom, you got yourself a nuclear disaster. Just look at the Francis Scott Key Bridge and imagine that that ship hadn't hit a bridge support but a nuclear powered vessel. Nuclear powered ships only make sense for ships operating in places where there is no other ship in sight for hundreds of miles (i.e. icebreakers) or for military ships that can and will shoot and sink anything with the potential of becoming a threat.
  - cenamus 11mo ago
    And floating power plants I suppose. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_floating_nuclear_power_station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_floating_nuclear_power...
ViewTrick1002 11mo ago
But an extremely expensive crew to run it coupled with extremely high CAPEX. Even navies are moving away from nuclear power due to how expensive it is.
HdS84 11mo ago
The germans tried that in the 60s see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Hahn_(ship) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Hahn_(ship). It was uneconomical. You need specialized engineers for that, you need special permissions for ports and the important canals are off limits due to risk.

jillesvangurp 11mo ago

Here's some back of the envelope math for batteries and ships: - Weight is less of a limitation than you would think. Ship size is measured in tonnage. 40K-60K is a medium sized cargo carrying ship. So lets assume a ship like that. - Battery weight calculations are going to be key. If you assume 170 wh/kg, 6 tonnes of battery equals about 1 mwh of battery. - Energy usage of ships is speed dependent and it's a non linear relationship. You can save a lot of energy by going a bit slower. Going about 15 knots, a ship like this might use 15mw of power. So the math becomes something like 6 x 15 = 90 tons of battery per hour. 5000km is about 2700 nautical miles (1 knot == 1 nautical mile/hour). So, you need about 180 hours of battery. Or about 16200 tons for a total of 15mwh x 180 = 2.7gwh of energy. That's a big battery. The real limitation here comes from the cost of the batteries, which is dropping fast with sodium ion. The reason CATL is bringing this up is because they've been doing similar math with some informed $/kwh math. If they can get it down to around 20$/kwh, a mwh would cost 20K, and a gwh would cost 20M. So the battery would cost 54M$. The key here is that this is still assuming 15knots. Energy usage might drop considerably if you drop it to 10 knots or even lower. You might only need 7200 tons of battery at those speeds. The ship can handle the weight either way, though you are sacrificing useful load of course. The real constraints here are cost and speed. You pay a fat premium for a fast ship. Of course ships this size aren't cheap. A few tens of millions is normal. And they burn through many millions worth of fuel per year too. So, even though that amount of battery is expensive, the math might actually work out to these ships being cheap enough to operate that they'd earn back their battery. You'd have to be pretty bullish about cost and performance of batteries. But CATL clearly feels that way. They have several battery chemistries at their disposal with higher densities (and cost). Over time, batteries might get cheaper and more dense. Ship designs might be optimized for batteries (e.g. structural hulls with battery). There's a lot of wiggle room here. But it's not an impossible proposition.

deleted 11mo ago
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pzo 11mo ago
I think another problem is how fast you will be able to charge such a huge battery and how expensive such ship battery charger will be and if you expect to have such charger at most ports (ideally for every docked ship). Will you even need a power plant at every port?

Havoc 11mo ago

I guess if it works for cars then boats should too

simgt 11mo ago

Sails [0] [1] [2] are obviously more sustainable than the gigantic industry needed around batteries this size. That'd of course massively increase the cost of shipping and suddenly producing most things locally would make more economical sense. Bye bye £2 jeans from Shein. [0] https://www.towt.eu/en/home/ https://www.towt.eu/en/home/ [1] https://www.neoline.eu/ https://www.neoline.eu/ [2] https://graindesail.com/fr/voilier-cargo-grain-de-sail-3/ https://graindesail.com/fr/voilier-cargo-grain-de-sail-3/

HPsquared 11mo ago
I wonder how much the jeans would cost if the price of shipping (i.e. the cost per container ocean mile) were to double.
- tralarpa 11mo ago
  I searched a little bit and found these numbers for t-shirts in a 20 foot container: - Shipping container from China to the US: $3000-$9000 (tariffs?) - Number of t-shirts per container: 35000 How much heavier are jeans than t-shirts? 10 times? That would mean an increase of $2.50 if container shipping costs double.
  - simgt 11mo ago
    I think the volume is what defines the cost for cargo shipping so your 10x is likely pessimistic. $2.50 is both significant relative to the price of one these jeans and not much compared to what has been the expected cost of a pair for decades. It says more about how dirt cheap shipping is the single enabler of globalization, even doubling the cost may not be enough to significantly shorten the supply chains.
nasmorn 11mo ago
Sorry this makes zero sense. The low price of shipping comes from the huge size of ships. All these 100% sailing ventures are just so someone can sell you gourmet coffee with a nice story at outrageous prices

Neil44 11mo ago

Since there is a lot of space out there in the ocean I wonder if some kind of big floating energy station could be a thing, using middle of the ocean wind, tidal or solar. I guess you don't have to pay anyone for the space or worry about too many regulations etc.

GJim 11mo ago
> I wonder if some kind of big floating energy station could be a thing Congratulations, you have just re-invented offshore (floating) wind turbines. https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ftsa&q=floating+wind+turbines+&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ftsa&q=floating+wind+turbines+&ia=... > I guess you don't have to pay anyone for the space or worry about too many regulations etc. I'm ammused you think offshore energy is lawless. It's the same assumption that had the entire maritime community laughing at the clowns behind 'Seasteding" and the amusing MS Satoshi 'cryptoship'.
- Neil44 11mo ago
  I found your reply unnecessarily snarky. The possibility I'l pondering would be to have a facility in deep ocean, far away from any countries coastline, but near shipping lanes.
LikeBeans 11mo ago
I like your idea. We can now generate substantial amount of power from floating wind turbines. Coupled with floating batteries (ie on cargo ships) we perhaps build floating charging stations along major shipping routes. There is no need for nuclear or to only charge at ports. Would it work?

api 11mo ago

The US with its sunk cost and political power base in fossil fuels is losing the innovators dilemma at a large scale here.

LikeBeans 11mo ago

Clusters of floating wind turbines each with their own battery storage might be useful here. I imagine along strategic (ie major) shipping channels. Would it pencil out? I have no idea.

LikeBeans 11mo ago
Actually thinking about it some more why not park a couple of dozen older cargo ships along major shipping route. Equip them with wind turbines and batteries in shipping containers. Now the actual cargo ships passing by can stop for a few hours, plug in and charge. Use sodium ion batteries that can support thousands of cycles. Even use regular fuel as a backup in the charging ships. You can build and maintain anywhere and then haul them to the right location.

throw0101d 11mo ago

Hybrid propulsion is already a thing in the marine world (often in navy/military designs): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_diesel–electric_and_gas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_diesel–electric_and_g... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_diesel–electric_and_diesel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_diesel–electric_and_d... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_electric_propulsion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_electric_propulsion