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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

Solar augmented boats could make a major dent in their oil consumption. Rememebr they have very tight margins and panels are now cheap. So, if they can cover say 10% of peak power needs the fraction goes up on slower trips which are common.

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Doubtful. Most ships have very little free surface area available for solar panels. They wouldn't provide enough extra thrust to justify the expense and weight. Adding an electric motor, clutch, and transmission to the prop shaft would be a huge engineering complication that would drive up construction, operations, and maintenance expenses. Bunker fuel and LNG would have to be an order of magnitude more expensive before solar augmented cargo ships would even begin to make economic sense.

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

That's just an experiment. It's nowhere near being commercially viable.

Indeed. But give it time. Wasn't self-driving cars "years" away just 3 years ago? Things can move fast. I would say "things can move fast when needed"..but I'm not sure how much need there was to drive the race for self driving cars besides the general interest from the public.

Level 4 autonomous vehicles are still years away. Level 1 - 3 cars can't legitimately be considered "self-driving" in any real sense.

they need a huge blanket to cover their cargo with, that'll recover most wasted surface

You're joking right? Have you ever been at sea in a storm? Have you ever seen operations at a cargo port?

Doesn't have to be always deployed but should be stowed in storm/ports - occasion in wich solar power wouldn't cut anyway

Of course such material doesn't exist etc

Again you've got to be kidding. There's nowhere to store a blanket of flexible photovoltaic cells. Plus the rigging necessary to stow and deploy would be huge, heavy, and expensive. It's just totally impractical, a complete pipe dream.

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