Rotor sail helps Finnish ferry Viking Grace reduce fuel consumption
metropolitan.fi
metropolitan.fi
Cargo shipping is ruthlessly cost-competitive, and fuel is currently 50-60% of costs. [1] With the new regulations that percent will increase.
Still it is telling the rotor sail in the example is on a passenger ship (where it has more PR value) not a cargo ship. That says to me the cost savings are really not there yet. Probably even stronger clean shipping rules are required before this kind of thing will be cost effective.
[1] https://www.morethanshipping.com/fuel-costs-ocean-shipping/
- Yes. Ultimately increasing the cost of the goods shipped.
-(Relatively) inexpensive shipping / transport is the foundation of the global economy. It's also its Achilles' heel.
Even if currently a financial break even, these sails seem like a smart hedge going forward. The eco benefit being the bonus round.
1. A ferry can be inspected continuously - after every run, end of day, end of season, etc.
2. The sail can be in the ideal position.
3. The sail will not get damaged during the loading/unloading process.
If people stopped buying things from far away that aren't really really necessary, maybe that will also reduce fuel use.
If someone's feet hurt, you don't tell them to lie down for the rest of their lives. You tell them to get better shoes.
Global trade reduces global warfare, too.
eat them
- gather local material as much as possible
use them with creativity (see the wood based buildings for instance)
I don't accept the "world status" anymore
The fuel used to ship your fruit from another side of the world is less or equal to the amount of fuel used to move the fruit from the harbor to your home.
If locally produced fruit requires refrigeration, they are very likely less ecological than shipping dried fruits or canned fruits from another side of the world.
If you scale back economies of scale you lose their efficiencies and it becomes a positive feedback loop where shipping rates increase and cost of goods increase and volumes decrease.
From what I understand, shipping long distances is super efficient per unit goods transported; the ship that drags whatever it is you buy across the ocean produces less carbon (per unit transported) than the truck from the port to your store, which emits less carbon per unit transported than your car going from the store to your home.
If you want to save fuel, argue for good public transit, higher density housing and mixed use zoning. Or, more controversially, perhaps look into efficient delivery services that deliver a lot of groceries to people in the same area.
I mean, to be clear, I'm not saying that pollution caused by larger transport should be ignored; it's probably easier to deal with pollution on a giant ship than on a thousand little cars, but my point is just that you should go after the biggest problem, that we live in low density areas and drive everywhere.
Note, people say there are a lot of economic arguments for buying local, though I personally think that is harder to analyze than simple carbon emissions, and I'm not addressing that here.
http://www.cleanmetrics.com/pages/ch9_0923.pdf
"Figure 9.3 also shows that the most energy-intensive transit link is often the last one–driving to the store. This is not surprising, because other studies, such as those by Browne et al. (2005) and Van Hauwermeiren et al. (2007), find that this link canbe the most carbon intensive even in European countries where consumers are tra- ditionally more energy conscious than their U.S. counterparts."
The air draft of a ship is a limited resource, as if a ship is too high above the water, it won't be able to pass under bridges and other port infrastructure. It strikes me that adding 24 meters to this might not be something cargo ships are willing to do.
See, for example, https://www.joc.com/port-news/us-ports/port-new-york-and-new... , where $1.3B is being spent to raise a bridge 64 feet to accompdate larger ships. That's 19 meters, which is in the ballpark of 24.
Here's an image of the ship with the new rotor sail on top: http://www.maritimeherald.com/2017/cruise-ferry-viking-grace...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkySails
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5186905/Cargo-ships-...
I realize this must be a test, but I’m surprised they don’t discuss plans for multiple. Are the projected savings actual or “theoretical”?
I was fortunate enough to have been given a tour when I was a child and the ship visited Sydney.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbosail
http://colaco.freeshell.org/downloads/alcyone/zoom_alcyone_c...
Two little horizontal 'wings' at the back are horizontal stabilizers. They are like wings but installed upside down (they produce negative lift and push the tail down).
Where can I see the ships with two?
With land based transport, it is wholly dependent on a nation state to be cooperative. Thst isn’t to say it wouldn’t be a solvable problem and I think generally most nations would see the benefits quickly but it only takes say the Russians having a fallout with the US (I’m the case of ever building that mythical Alaska to Russia bridge in the Bering sea to interconnect the continents) for them to cut someone off. Or let’s say a middle eastern terrorist group decides to blow up trade tracks that lead from China and great Asia into Europe.
Most of that political strife is safely ignored via sea trade. Honestly I believe that’s what holds back globally connected rail which I think has a cheaper long run cost and could more reliably deliver goods in a perfect world
I don’t have sufficient research to back this up at the one time though I simply just remember reading about this a few years back
Of course, it will go through Russia and Belarus. I’m not sure anyone will be too keen to rely on it absolutely.
You won't be able to go directly into the wind, as the forward component can't be too small.
I guess you need to spin it in the right direction unless you want to go backwards...
The only other recent sail boost attempt is kite based approach: https://www.treehugger.com/cars/cargo-ship-with-kites-first-...
A cynic might of course also propose that you can't get public research money or patents for a product based on traditional sail...
Why would that be the case for a sail that gives the same fuel reduction? Are these rotors less impacted by sudden gusts of high wind speed than traditional sails?
That load has to go somewhere. Rigging is a way to do so with traditional materials, but nowadays, a sturdier mast without rigging is possible.
(Rationale: if the ‘mast’ hidden in these rotors can be made strong enough, we can also create a mast holding a traditional sail taking the same load)
If you had any experience with sailing, especialy on the high seas in a variety of conditions, you'd have a much better understanding of the problems.
If you have the means to go out on the sea in a sailboat, I highly recommend it. Especially for someone with a STEM background, it's actually a quite interesting activity.
http://collections.rmg.co.uk/collections/objects/66022.html
Apparently the savings in fuel consumption were ~10%, so not really worth the hassle. Viking Grace's new tube may actually be more effective if the 20% of fuel savings can be trusted, besides being simpler to operate and less intrusive.
There's a reason the age of sail is in the past, it couldn't even compete with steam.
I think we should built giant cargo tugs with wind and solar power. They can just hook up to a cargo ship in the high seas and tow it. That way we can keep the existing ships.
I think this phrase would frighten any professional sailor. Tugboats don't really operate very far from shore, for good reason. You don't want to be in a storm and see the giant load to which you are strapped passing you and starting to roll.
This isn't like programming where a little complexity can be handled at a trivial cost. Even if the tugs were say, AI controlled, so that endangering other sailors wasn't an immediate concern, these tugs would still be potential sources of catastrophic damage when fighting inclimate seas due to the size and materials they would have to be made from to actually make any significant difference in getting a fully laden cargo ship from A to B.
Tugs are justifiable on inland waters or near ports because they are generally there to replace the ship they are towing's need or means to manoeuvre, enabling smaller, tighter movements than the ship is capable of under its own power. It also enables a transfer of control from a helmsman who may not know the particulars of a port or waterway at that time, to that of a local who's only job is juggling ships in that port day in and day out.
Think of tugs as Valets. You don't want to deal with the hassle of dealing with one on the open sea, and it is guaranteed one you bring along with you won't know anything useful about where you are going. Best to just let the destination worry about it.
The best approach would be to develop a system that could be relatively quickly integrated into current hulls during a quick refit, or to start designing new hulls with the system from the get go. The physical world doesn't take kindly to hack jobs.
Disclaimer: not a sailor, just fascinated by logistics. If I have made any undue assumptions, please feel free to correct me.
You would need a new kind of tug, more resilient to waves and storms, with crew quarters, room for provisions and all of the life saving gear a normal open ocean ship has. You may as well build a new cargo ship.
There's a couple of interesting quotes on the wiki page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkySails):
> There’s a structural problem slowing down the process: ship owners (who have to make the investment) often don’t pay for the fuel – that’s the charterer’s duty. The charterer on the other side doesn’t charter the ship for long enough a period to make low-carbon technologies pay back. — Henning Kuehl, head of business development at SkySails
and
>Fuel costs mostly get passed onto the shipper so we see little use in installing potentially expensive, untested technology to which we see no other benefit. Basically I am interested but will not be the first to try it on a large scale. — Anonymous ship owner
So essentially it looks like the incentives are all in the wrong places for such technology to see rapid implementation.
Also, ships don't just go to waste when they reach EOL, if they do. They get scrapped, similar to a car I guess, but a lot of material can be reused or recycled or sold, and so on.
Anyways yeah, giant tugs, not a good idea. Not a good use of resources.
This is the reverse of when managers make ridiculous assumptions about programming that stem from a complete lack of understanding.
Towing big ships is hugely dangerous.