Re:Electric Ship Batteries Promise Compact, Cooler Power
by namibj on Thursday November 12, 2026 @03:13PM
(#50473479)
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.
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.