All-electric passenger ferry to be built in New Zealand
nzherald.co.nz
nzherald.co.nz
The ferries are automatically recharged by a robotic system at each port while they are loaded, it's pretty neat.
Quite a bit larger than the NZ one (4 times the length) , about a MW of power (max), and, reading https://electrek.co/2018/02/03/all-electric-ferry-cuts-emiss..., about a MWh of battery capacity.
This isn’t built for long distances, but a good first step.
https://electrek.co/2017/08/24/all-electric-ferries-abb/
These aren't small ships, 10,000 tons.
"Johnson just set the world-record fastest pitch ever! against an eastern conference team on an odd calendar day during an avocado price crisis"
Sigh. Not everyone is blessed to be have been born in the southern hemisphere, it seems.
As a resident of the big island to NZ's west, it is welcome news, particularly juxtaposed with my own government's lagging response to climate change, in a pacific region with many low lying island nations.
Having personally caught ferries in Australia and Chile, as well as between the border of Argentina and Uruguay, I reflect then on how each nation's carbon footprint could be reduced by adopting such technology.
But the southern hemisphere is isolated and was largely late to be colonised, it's also half the planet.
“Land areas are distributed predominantly in the Northern Hemisphere (68%) relative to the Southern Hemisphere (32%) as divided by the equator.”
Of course there's the language but my attachment to England ended 160 years ago and my only visit to the US I found strangely alien, feeling more at home across the border in Canada.
So? Why do we care? Why should everyone have to read your pointless comment about that?
- since few (not so few) years all mid-size/large boat thrusters are electric, normally powered by combustible oil generators, they have replaced expensive diesel engines used in the past;
- we know very well how simple and effective an electric engine is, unfortunately we also know how hard is storing electricity.
Long story short IMO all these "battery-based electrical vehicles", ferry, plane etc included are simple stupid engineering games or marketing moves until we found an affordable way to store electricity enough.
Also people should take into account that we use petrol not only as an energy source but also for plastic, witch include nearly anything from electrical insulation to packaging solution and we do not have real/more environmental friendly alternatives for most of these uses. That's of course does not means that we have to keep going with petrol, but means that we need far more research before doing real move.
In the meantime people should consider in terms of pollution how many emissions they can produce building modern, small, insulated homes (reducing both steel usage that it's a real problem today since we are really start to fall short and HVAC/heating power consumption), consider that we can use alcohol and methane for car and small vehicle power in general, they produce both far less pollutants than petrol/diesel fuel.
Unpredictable rainfall (e.g. extended droughts brought on by climate change) is the biggest risk factor when hydroelectricity dominates a country's energy supply. New Zealand is a good example of this: in some winters there isn't enough storage in the lakes [due to a lack of rainfall] and wholesale electricity prices spike dramatically.
That's the problem, certainly not electricity for buildings!
Correct, but you failed (intentionally?) to note that now we have. More specifically, every year the proportion of the totality of vehicles becomes a logical target for elctrification grows larger. Would you really dispute that?
>consider that we can use alcohol and methane for car and small vehicle power in general, they produce both far less pollutants than petrol/diesel fuel.
The day has passed when that would be better option than electrification.
>In the meantime people should consider in terms of pollution how many emissions they can produce building modern, small, insulated homes (reducing both steel usage that it's a real problem today since we are really start to fall short and HVAC/heating power consumption)
Why can't we do both?
We can't produce and dispose enough battery to electrify our personal vehicle only at country-scale, we can't produce and distribute enough energy to charge them.
Consider that at a certain scale we can do tons of things, but only at a certain, limited, scale. In Germany hydraulic-propellers for trains are still fairly common, they are super-duper complex to design and maintain but they was pushed as a flag of excellent German industry decades ago and they have them even if are monsters and does not really scale nor offer any practical advantage. In the '60s Italian Ansaldo have designed and build electric planes with electricity generator inside the fuselage, they fly well but they can move around half the load of the correspondent classic-design plane and they cost more, another Italian industry, Fiat, have built personal cars with a jet-mini-turbine engine as a power generator + electric motors, they works however they are so noisy, they eject too much heat, they consume so much fuel that they simply drop it.
The fact that we can do something it does not means automatically that it's a good things to do nor that can scale. We can save enormous resources and improve our lives building energy-efficient houses so it's a good move, we can't for now produce electric vehicles so we have to research (a forgotten thing in managerial-era) but not try to push something we know can't scale.