Hacker News Reader

Comment by acchow | Hacker News Reader

But 5000km is shorter than many major routes, right?

Shanghai to Los Angeles is more than double that

The route length isn't important, only the longest distance between ports that you can recharge at. Cargo ships regularly slow steam (I.e. run the engine slow to improve fuel-efficiency) and stopping to recharge batteries at multiple ports to reduce the batteries needed is the exact same concept - sacrificing speed to improve fuel costs.

Shanghai to LA is probably the worst example (since the pacific ocean is basically the emptiest spot on the planet, as land/port frequency goes), but Hawaii still exists and they could recharge there.

How does Hawaii produce its power? I can't imagine they have tons of capacity.

EDIT: Seems like they mostly use imported oil, so saying "bring us a bunch of oil and we'll charge your batteries with it" seems like the ship is just burning oil with extra steps.

I bet these batteries would be standard container sized and they could be shipped as normal containers would be wherever cheap power is available from nuclear or solar or maybe water. Australia could be huge here, back in 2024 there were news of a six gigawatt solar farm in remote Northern Australia. Based on my very vague knowledge of the geography I presume there's plenty more desert to build solar there. Charge the battery-containers, ship them to China.

Whatever they are, you can't say "how does the ship refuel when it's empty? I know, it'll carry its own extra fuel".

No, no you misunderstand, the ports will provide fuel in the form of charged battery containers and there will be runs solely to carry these charged batteries from wherever they can be charged cheap to ports where charging is expensive/unavailable.

Los Angeles port already tries to achieve zero-emissions operations by 2030 I presume more solar could be added. And I guess some/many ports and Los Angeles specifically could use wave energy. But, again, I could very well imagine Northern Australia supply ports in Eastern Asia.

I don’t understand why Hawaii doesn’t have more solar. Gotta be a lot cheaper than imported oil, even with the the US solar premium.

In any case, the near-term use case isn’t across the Pacific, it’s to other Asian ports, of which there are numerous very large ones in reasonably close proximity. Think Singapore, Japan, Korea, and so on, all of which are well within 5000km of Chinese ports.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com