I hear you and while this is out of scope for the article a lot of sailing yachts are being converted to electric motors.

for sailing yachts that makes sense. They would use wind for most movement. While in harbor though they want the finer control that being under power allows - they don't need high speed/high power then though. They also don't spend a lot of time in this situation.

Electric tugs are now a thing to do similar for big ships.

A step before that is to have shore power to run things when in port.

In general stopping pollution near populated areas and busy ports is a bigger win and so a good place to start.

I think sailing uses mainly some other kind of energy source.

Right. And sailing container ships seem to also be coming back into vogue.

They're more like sail assisted than really "sailing" as such. Worth doing in some cases but saves maybe 10% of fuel under optimal wind conditions. The most suitable vessels will tend to be bulkers, car carriers, and tankers. Container ships are actually the hardest to add sails because they interfere with the stacks and the port cranes.

10% is a lot though.

The Neoliner Origin is a pretty interesting ship. Perhaps more ships like it will start to show up as oil gets more expensive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliner_Origin

The Neoliner Origin is a joke. It's a marketing stunt to greenwash the importation of low-volume luxury goods like cosmetics for rich customers who want to tell their friends about how they're saving the planet. The design can't scale up to transport bulk cargo in a cost effective way.

Sure but you have to start somewhere. Ive been reading about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind-assisted_propulsion for the last 30 years so I figure every slow step forward is still a step.

Gonna work great when ocean & wind currents die/change from climate change.

It makes so much sense. The one's I've seen can be engaged in recovery mode while running your sails, so you can spin the prop and generate electricity. They only get a few hours run time fully charged, but that's plenty for port maneuvers or trip to pick up your crab pots.

More modern battery chemistries are less hazardous as well. LFP for example is both cheaper and more stable, just at the cost of energy density. Which might be fine if you have a giant ship that can handle a large volume and mass of batteries to save on fuel costs.

TFA specifically said volume is the last thing a ship operator wants to sacrifice. Volume used for batteries is volume that cannot be used for cargo.

A huge amount of volume is already used for fuel and the engine. 2 million gallons of fuel for a Panamax is around 7,600 cubic meters.

A TEU is about 38.5 cubic meters. So that works out to about 200 TEU. A Panamax can carry about 5000 TEU worth of containers.

So all the fuel is about 4% of the cargo capacity.

> You have an unlimited amount of water with which to fight any fires

Fire on a ship is extremely dangerous. Think about what your training and your first instincts both tell you to do if there's a serious fire. Where I am the training starts with four words: "Get out. Stay out". But you can't just leave a ship, in the ocean you will drown. Even lifeboats, if they're available and can be used, are much more dangerous than we'd like.

Nuclear power isn't going to happen for merchant vessels (outside some very limited cases like Russia's state owned icebreakers). Unlike superpower navies, shipping lines can't afford to train and pay nuclear engineers plus the necessary armed security personnel. Many countries refuse to allow commercial nuclear vessels to enter their ports due to fears over terrorist attacks, or environmental catastrophe from an accidental sinking.

Unlike superpower navies, shipping lines can't afford to train and pay nuclear engineers plus the necessary armed security personnel.

Yeah, people are probably better off not knowing how insanely cheap shipping lines are. Shipping is one of those parts of the economy and trade that is simultaneously advanced and very old fashioned (in the rickety sense) at the same time.

It's quite fun to do the math on what it would take to power the largest container ships by batteries. It's not physically impossible but it would displace a good chunk of the usable cargo load.

A single container can contain up to 8mwh of capacity. Just 125 of those gets you to 1gwh. Depending on how quick the ship goes, you might need 1-2 gwh per day. You can conserve energy by going slower. But out of 14K containers, reserving maybe a third for battery could power a ship for quite some time. Enough to e.g. cross the Pacific. There are obvious issues with weight and balance. The volume is doable but the weight creates a lot of issues.

Another challenge is indeed the cost of these batteries. That's about an order of magnitude of where it needs to be to make it financially realistic. But batteries coming down further in cost could make this more feasible. And it's not like these huge container ships are cheap. A couple of tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars worth of battery is reasonable. Billions would be unreasonable.

There are traditionally powered ships carrying many thousands of EVs with batteries already. So, putting a few gwh of battery on a ship is already happening; we're just not using them to move the ship. And batteries made in China are typically shipped to the US and elsewhere for integrating into cars, grid storage, etc. as well. If you can ship it, you might as well use it. And of course battery powered ships are already very popular for lighter short haul like ferries, tug boats, small transport barges on rivers, etc. There are plenty of them operational without major issues. Safety issues seem to be so far not a blocker.

The incentive here is not burning a millions of dollars worth of fuel per journey. Container ships use a lot of fuel. That adds up fairly rapidly to offsetting the cost of the battery. I think the question is not if batteries will be used on ships but how much batteries typical ships will have.

> A single container can contain up to 8mwh of capacity.

That's about 10 months of power for my home and car (gas heating). A 40' container on my drive or buried in the garden would power the house through the winter. It's crazy when you think how solvable season-shifting domestic power use is.

A lot of things are solvable if you don't care how much they cost

a couple of years ago it was $2m to store the same energy in the same way.

Excluding the car and heating, it's $40k for battery to store enough power to run my house for a week. Including heating at a 3:1 ratio for a heat pump compared with gas on the coldest week of the last year and it's $80k. That's less than 20% of the cost of the house. Throw in $10k of solar (about 35kWp) and even this far north - on the coldest days it tends to be clear skies and that would generate enough to recharge the battery without even touching the grid. The 35kWp wouldn't fit on the roof, but certainly would fit in a nearby field for basically zero cost for the land.

It's also crazy to think about how energy efficient it is to shorten supply chains where possible.

It'd be better to build more insulated and air tight homes (bonus if they're not single family - shared walls save on heating). Then it doesn't require so much energy to heat and cool.

What about battery self-discharge over months?

What kind of shore-to-ship power connection would you need to recharge the batteries while the ship is unloaded/loaded?

Assuming 100$/kWh and those 2G$ (giga/billion), a full charge would be 20 GWh.

Realistically: probably exposed wire like on regular high voltage pylons. Hooked to a not-too-far (the wires will be on the larger end, but you likely don't want the other end to be anywhere it could get in the way of cargo operations, and given the voltages involved, you can probably get half way across the city before it really begins to matter) grid battery bank that normally takes care of day-to-day scale grid balancing/energy arbitrage.

Then you just run a (group of) wires to the ship and apply basically the same principles as those DC fast charge stations for cars, except that you feed the high power DC link of the charging cable from the shore-side battery through much more efficient and importantly cheaper DC/DC regulators instead of involving transformers and AC.

You obviously have remote-controlled switches and circuit breakers to keep those cables grounded while the workers hook them up. You'd probably have several DC links that have their own DC/DC regulators and can be split between ships. Mostly also because there's a limit to how high-current any individual cable/connector is made in practice and because you want to use the current rating on your DC/DC converters and the thick-but-off-the-shelf cables between the battery park and the pier.

Note that these are huge: the largest grid battery plant in operation (according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_energy_storage_system ) is only 4GWh, so 1/5th of such a ship.

Do note that you could go for technology like the 100 hour ("0.01C") iron-air batteries "form energy" works on, especially if you're willing to swap them in port instead of DC fast charging through a temporary high voltage link.

You'd get the benefit of charging them when it's sufficiently convenient (off-peak), and the lower energy density and very low power density don't matter nearly as much on a ship.

you could fill the double hull compartment with electrolyte and fit nickel plates inside, voila, a nickel iron battery with no extra space taken up.

only problem i see is all the cells would be in parallel due to the single hull, so the voltage would be very low.