Hey, there! Log in / Register

Hybrids come in ship form now

NorthEndWaterfront.com snapped the Emerald Ace, which uses solar power and lithium-ion batteries to help it carry up to 6,400 cars at a time, as it passed through Boston Harbor yesterday.

Neighborhoods: 
Free tagging: 


Ad:


Like the job UHub is doing? Consider a contribution. Thanks!

Comments

There's some irony here..

A solar powered passenger car vessel carrying gas-guzzling, not-eco-friendly, cars.

up
Voting closed 0

Friendly about shipping 6,400 cars across the globe regardless of the ships fuel source.

up
Voting closed 0

So what makes it not eco friendly? the ship itself or the cargo.

The ship is.. it doesn't use fossil fuels or pollute.

Its cargo on the other hand.

up
Voting closed 0

The panels and batteries are mainly for electricity and for powering the ship when it's in port. It still uses diesel when it's underway. Better than nothing, but not 100% clean.

up
Voting closed 0

The solar panels and battery are not used for motive power.

The batteries are charged during the trip by the solar panels, and then the batteries and panels power the ship's electrical systems while in port.

It means they're not running diesel generators while in port, and they don't need to jack into power connections at the dock.

...But those generators are about the cleanest thing that comes out of a cargo ship. They run on diesel, and have to meet port / country emissions regulations (which aren't anywhere near as stringent as those placed on cars, but there's still SOMETHING.)

While the ship is underway, its main engines are burning the nastiest of nasty fuels, bunker fuel - which is so close to tar, it has to be kept heated in order to be liquid enough to be pumped out of the fuel tanks. Bunker fuel is incredibly bad emissions-wise.

This is basically a combination of green-washing / them avoiding fees for jacking in to the power available at the pier.

up
Voting closed 0

Thanks for clarification. I knew nothing of this ship until the post above. Solar Panels have come a long way, so why not boat propulsion too? Apparently not yet, or at least here.

So yeah it's a gas guzzler. I wont delete my OP cuz its funny but you're right

up
Voting closed 0

If the ship were diesel-electric powered, like on train locomotives, then having it plastered with solar panels could reduce its emissions. BUT - those ships burn a huge amount of fuel. Many, many gallons per mile. There's no way you could fit enough PV panels on it to power the whole thing. I remember seeing that some cargo ships are being fitted with sails, which is very eco-friendly, but still only supplement to the oil-fired main power.

up
Voting closed 0

The engines that power these ships are sized in the tens of thousands of horsepower. ~40,000HP, and there's often two of them.

To be charitable, let's assume just one 40,000HP engine. That's roughly 30 megawatts of power.

A huge solar farm like the one in Dartmouth is SIX megawatts. It uses 20,000 panels (that's not a typo), and that's only for one fifth the power the ship needs.

Shipping companies have been experimenting with various kite-like sail systems, but the shipping industry relies heavily on predictable transit time. The last of the sailing cargo ships weren't killed off by steam ships because of cargo capacity or speed; sailing ships were much faster and could carry far more because they didn't have to dedicate stores to fuel. The steam ships showed up predictably, and that turned out to be of substantial value.

The shipping industry won't change until we're sufficiently future-ized that we have Mr. Fusion reactors that'll run off banana peels and coke.

up
Voting closed 0

It uses fossil fuel for propulsion.

up
Voting closed 0

Let’s here about how “nobody” drives anymore. Traffic gridlock is not tied to overdevelopment. We don’t need more parking spaces but more housing.

up
Voting closed 0

No, traffic gridlock is tied to car-oriented overdevelopment. Which means parking lots.

Plenty of cities around the world have more people and fewer cars per square mile than we do. As long as we keep building for cars, which hasn't stopped despite some news articles about millennials and stuff, we won't solve the problem.

up
Voting closed 0

I believe the solar panels only power the internal lighting in the cargo holds. The ships engines run entirely on fossil fuel.

up
Voting closed 0

The lithium ion batteries, charged while underway, with the solar panels are used for lighting when berthed. The diesel generators that power the lights are used at sea. The hybrid system is used only when in port to keep the diesel fumes to a minimum.

up
Voting closed 0

the solar panels & batteries are ONLY for when she is docked, the + no emissions when unloading the vehicles. https://www.mol.co.jp/en/pr/2012/12035.html

up
Voting closed 0

Interesting - that's the second example of hybrid-powered water transportation I've seen in less than a week.

I was at the canal museum in Easton, PA last week - took a ride on a mule-drawn canal barge.

up
Voting closed 0

Let's not get too warm and fuzzy about this.

Basic math: A ship of this size features 10 to 20,000 kW diesel engines to propel it across the ocean. Possibly larger, but interestingly the article only tell us about the size of the (comparatively minuscule) solar array.

160 kW of solar power (when the sun is shining) provides a negligible amount of the total energy involved in powering that beast in a cross ocean trip (likely well under 1%). Moving at a slightly lower speed would have a much greater effect on fuel consumption.

And as someone else pointed out, it's bringing more cars to our shores because we don't have enough of them already.

I'll concede that this greenwashing is an excellent PR strategy though.

up
Voting closed 0

"If I genuinely believed in 12 years coastal areas would be under water, I wouldn't buy a $15 million mansion on...Martha's Vineyard," said podcast host Amy Curtis. "Call me crazy, but it doesn't seem like Obama is taking climate change all that seriously."

If you believe AOC, Ed Markey and the leaders of today's Democrat party, in about 11.4 years, ships will be sailing over, not past, Obama's new oceanside mega-mansion. It would take a heart of stone not to laugh.

This barely green ship reminds me of electric cars. When not catching fire, they allow the wealthy to "feel good" driving that Tesla with no emissions in their own rich, tony neighborhoods while the toxic emissions are relocated to a power plant in a poor community that couldn't fight big energy. Is it "progressive" to transfer emissions and cancer to the underprivileged?

up
Voting closed 0

clean coal.

back under the rock fish you are out of your element.

up
Voting closed 0

CITATIONS NEEDED

up
Voting closed 0

Never, never, never, never, never, never, never?

Yes, electric vehicles and plug-ins rely on power plants. But they're still far less polluting than internal-combustion and diesel vehicles because a) single-source power sources, such as power plants are easier to ratchet down the pollution, especially as even the US moves away from coal and b) electric engines are simply more efficient or far less complex than internal combustion or pure diesel engines. Shocking but true: There have been Chevy Volt-like engines (in which a fossil fuel is burned to provide energy for an electric motor) since the early part of the last century.

up
Voting closed 0

No --- Way for that ship to be powered by Sunlight directly except of course if it was a sailing vessel [wind being powered by solar radiation falling on the land and the ocean].

Alternatively, the ship could be powered indirectly by Sunlight using manual labor [e.g. Viking / Greek Trireme-style] powered by hefty gents [and I guess these days gals] pulling the oars. Their human power is fueled by eating stuff growing in sunlight, or eating other things which are consuming the stuff growing in sunlight. Of course ultimately the fossil fuel that the ship does use for propulsion is fueled by ancient sunlight stored in very concentrated form in the ground until we liberate it.

The basic problem of sunlight powering anything directly is that Sunlight is very diffuse. Even in outer space [e.g. a GPS satellite] only a bit over 1 kW ]1363 W/m^2] falls on a solar panel with an area of a square meter. The best that our commercially available technology can do is to convert about 20% of that solar energy into electricity -- the rest is waste heat. That means for one kW of output electricity [about what it takes to run a 1 HP motor with average efficiency] in space you need about 4 sq meters to catch the sunlight [a panel about twice the size of a beach umbrella or two kitchen doors]. So in effect a sq m of solar panel will deliver to your load a continuous 272.6 W -- enough to power a motor in a home food processor or bread machine.

Down on the earth you have clouds, clear air absorption and scattering [dust, smoke, pollen grains, some bacteria, aerosols [very fine droplets] resulting from volcanic emissions and by products of plant growth [President Reagan was right when he noted that the Blue Ridge and the Great Smokey Mountains are hazy blue because of the trees]. Let's assume about 30% less intensity without clouds on the ground compared to space.

Based on average cloudiness over the ocean let's assume that the ship might see about 1/2 the solar intensity compared to space. So now at sea to deliver a 1kW to power that 1 HP Motor [actual conversion is 745.7 W / HP but there is at least a 20% loss in the motor and the controller so the 1 KW per realized HP is fair] we need a solar array with an area of 8 sq m at noon any day on the equator at sea [the only time the sunlight falls directly on the panel at full intensity. In other words the 1 sq m solar array is capable of delivering a usable 136.3 W -- it will drive a fan to keep you cool on a hot summer day [but there is no power left to run the compressor so its just a breeze not a cool one].

And of course nothing at night and always less than full intensity during the day [except at noon] unless you turn your panels to track the apparent motion of the sun. Let's assume that we track the sun at no cost in energy [not of course possible] and have perfectly efficient storage and recovery of energy [no battery of any kind can ever deliver this] then we need to account for the night time which translates into double the solar array needed just for daytime.

Now our ship sailing only on a course along or very near to the equator needs to have an array with an area of 16 sq m for a 1 HP motor. For a small cargo ship in the 10,000 tons range the necessary HP scales with the mass of the ship -- so an estimate of 1000 HP is fair. For a huge bulk carrier, oil tanker or container ship*1 the great length makes the ship more efficient and the ratio decreases so that even the largest ships use engines with 100,000 HP or less [the exception being Nuclear Powered Aircraft Carriers whose total HP can exceed 300,000 in the Gerald Ford Class {CVN-78} 350,000 shaft horsepower (260 MW)].
Let’s consider our Solar Ship to cruise relatively slowly so as to require only 10,000 HP === 10,000 kW of Solar Electricity. Sailing on a course within a few degrees of the equator we need to have solar cells cover 160,000 sq m to provide our ship with enough electricity to run day and night with 10,000 HP. So how big is our Solar Ship well 300 m is about the length of the USS Gerald Ford [337 m] and its about 80 m wide at the level of the flight deck [78 m] that provides a total area of 24,000 sq m == enough to provide power for 1500 HP to drive the ship at a very modest rate.

Note that the power required to drive a ship through the water depends on the length of the ship {by the square root} and on the speed {approximately by the cube}. We will need more than the 1500 kW available on the deck of the Ford to provide power to maneuver in storm conditions and such – so let’s take an engineering margin of 3X and design for 4,500 kW continuous Power output. That very modest requirement in terms of power translates into a solar array covering 72,000 sq m or a ship roughly 3x the Gerald Ford – which will be limited to accessing a very small number of ports in the world. [

by comparison the two compact Bechtel A1B Nuclear Reactors on the Ford produce enough steam to generate 125 megawatts (168,000 hp) of electricity, plus 350,000 shaft horsepower (260 MW) to power the four propeller shafts and drive the huge ship at a continuous speed in excess of 30 knots for 50 years without refueling

[from the wiki on the Ford and the A1B reactor]

Moral of the story – if you want to power a ship by sunlight – go sailing with a very small motor for maneuvering in the harbor.

*1 the Emma Maersk a huge container vessel 170,000 tons cruises at 30 knots powered by the world's largest marine diesel engine

World's largest diesel engine makes 109,000 horsepower
CHRIS SHUNK
Jul 22nd 2011 at 3:31PM

Shipping goods from China to the U.S. is big business. And when we say big, we're talking 1,300-foot-long ships that weigh 170,974 tons. The cargo ships in question can carry 11,000 20-foot shipping containers at a breakneck speed of 31 knots.
109,000-horsepower Wärtsilä-Sulzer RTA96-C,

https://www.autoblog.com/2011/07/22/worlds-largest-diesel-engine-makes-1...

up
Voting closed 0