Electric 10000 ton container ship has begun service with over 50MWh in batteries | Hacker News Reader

Electric 10000 ton container ship has begun service with over 50MWh in batteries

electrek.co

So 10K ton is the deadweight tonnage, not the capacity. According to[0] (a better source?) this little fella has a capacity of 700 TEU. The largest ships in the world (MSC Irina, MSC Loreto) have a TEU of 24,346, the largest COSCO ships are 21,413. New Panamax are 10,000-14,500 TEU.

"Container ships under 3,000 TEU are typically called feeders. In some areas of the world, they might be outfitted with cargo cranes."[1]

[0]: https://www.electrive.com/2024/05/02/worlds-largest-electric... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container_ship

True, but these feeders are quite numerous and there could be 10 anyways for each large sea going container ship on a global average. And they would be working constantly to bring capacity out from larger ships anchored in bays and bring it up rivers or canals.

So it's a good start though. From looking at its design this one is mostly for river use or litterol water operation.

A few 100 containers, a few hundred mile range. Most definitely not one of those giants that haul 10k+ containers from continent to continent.

That said: there's maaanny of such smaller ships. And maaanny of such shorter routes. So, nice to see electric shipping break into that market.

Vaclav Smil:"To have an electric ship whose batteries and motors weighed no more than the fuel (about 5,000 tons) and the diesel engine (about 2,000 tons) in today’s large container vessels, we would need batteries with an energy density more than 10 times as high as today’s best Li-ion units. But that’s a tall order indeed: in the past 70 years, the energy density of the best commercial batteries has not even quadrupled." https://www.cupofinsights.com/post/vaclav-smil-numbers-don-t...

Took me down a rabbit hole to the Nimitz and nuclear. If anyone wants to join, this thesis out of MIT was comprehensive:

https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/103656/953286...

O/T but one of this guy's advisers is a "TEPCO professor of Nuclear Engineering" ... oof. This paper was published in 2015 too. A bit like having the Morton Thiokol Professor of Spacecraft Engineering. You'd think they'd give the money back or at least change the name...

"Following the successful launch, the Green Water 01 has commenced weekly service between Shanghai and Nanjing."

That's a travel distance of less than 200mi. Don't expect ocean-crossing container ships using batteries anytime soon.

The constraints on battery powered vessels are, perhaps surprisingly, not really associated with weight or volume at all, but with cost.

So ocean going container ships will be a question of economics. I agree that we won't see large ocean crossings happening on 100% battery but there will be a few trends:

1. "Green corridors" where electric container ships know they'll be able to get their battery containers swapped.

2. Hybrid marine diesel generators plus battery (battery for nearshore waters and ports and diesel for offshore). The battery gets 100% utilised but doesn't cover your whole trip. The marine diesel generators get to work with high efficiency, being at a constant optimum operating point.

3. Potentially - new dedicated refueling ports situated in coastal deserts. Their only real purpose is to load and unload batteries and recharge them with cheap renewables. Port fees are a significant proportion of container ship operating expenditure so it might be uneconomic to clog up a busy port with battery change-out.

4. Change to shipping cost structure changes shipping routes - rather than shipping cost being proportional to distance, electrified routes will have lower cost per km as long as they follow a coast and stop to change batteries. When you look at those maps of shipping routes, there are not that many locations where you HAVE to make long ocean voyages; you can follow the coast instead without adding much distance. This means we can't necessarily assume today's pattern of shipping remains constant.

5. Reduced shipping of crude oil and coal

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