The reality of large internal combustion engines is you still pay for every single kWh. These ships already have extremely complex electrical systems with multiple redundancies and load balancing etc.
The dealbreaker is R&D as unlike a house or sailboat you can’t just yolo where panels are placed and wires run etc, this is all bespoke engineering with few of any give design being manufactured. Thus the R&D costs sink the concept without some external regulations.
If you said fuel was 5.5 MWh per tonne people would wonder what you cut it with.
The reality of outputting 80MW is that the power to your lights is a rounding error and you’d be better off buying a robot to regularly clean the hull.
That’s almost correct, good try.
> lights is a rounding error
Ships use electrical power for far more than lighting, and no electricity is not a rounding error compared to profit it’s a significant expense for cargo ships.
For example, one tonne of fuel is about 11 MWh. So if you run the calculations, you will see that adding solar panels to a diesel boat, even if the energy they provide is free, essentially never ROIs, and makes the boat less reliable and useful as a boat.
These kinds of engines generate tens of megawatts when they are on, and they are always on when the ship is moving.