Electric Car Ferries Enter Service In Norway (bbc.co.uk)

AmiMoJo writes from a report via BBC: Following two years of trials of the world's first electric car ferry, named Ampere, Norwegian ferry operators are busy making the transition from diesel. It is thought that 84 ferries are ripe for conversion to electric power, and 43 ferries on longer routes would benefit from conversion to hybrids that use diesel engines to charge their batteries. If this were done, nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions would be cut by 8,000 tons per year and CO2 emissions by 300,000 tons per year, equivalent to the annual emissions from 150,000 cars. The Ampere uses an 800kWh battery, equivalent to 8 high end Tesla cars. According to a report from Siemens and environmental campaign group Bellona, long-distance ferries are not well suited to electrification, but about 70% of Norway's ferries cover relatively short crossings, so switching to electric power would pay for itself in a few years. The BBC report also mentions some of the challenges associated with converting the diesel ferries to electric ferries. For example, "during initial trials, the fast charging placed excessive strain on the local grid, designed as it was to service a relatively small population," reports BBC. "To lighten the load, high-capacity batteries were put on constant charge on either side of the fjord, ready to transfer the electricity quickly to the ferry's batteries whilst docked."

Comments

Re:typical delusion

[beelsebob]

Yes - and externalising them is exactly the key to reducing them.

By putting them at the generating station, you allow that generating station to use wind, waves, gravitational potential energy, light, nuclear decay, ... to power the vehicle, rather than petrol.

Further, you also simply make the whole system more efficient - petrol motors are horribly inefficient, typically around 30-35%. The very very very best, used in Formula 1 cars only achieve around 50% efficiency. And that's ignoring all the other efficiency losses involved in a petrol vehicle, such as the efficiency of the gearbox, the transmission losses of petrol from having to drive a truck carrying it out to the petrol station, and the generation losses in refining the oil.

Finally, that's all assuming that you're right that the generation station causes emmissions... Which you aren't. Currently, 99% of electricity production for the Norwegian grid is from renewable sources.

Country dependant

[DrYak]

*sigh*. Electric cars cause emissions- they're just externalized at the generating station.

Which usually given the electricity generation available in the country, tends to be much more efficient than the ICE in a car. (with a few exception like China, India and Australia - according to source which are easy to Google, but I'm too lazy to find yet again for the nth argument about the same subject).

Yes, the US burns fossils to create electricity, but over the life time of a car, even taking into account the initial manufacture (a battery is more complex to build), an electrical car in the US still causes less emissions than a gaz-powered one.

In TFA's Norway, electricity comes mainly from hydro. And even if it's not an Alpine region, the climate is more or less comparable and thus hydro has a very tiny output of green-house gazes and other pollution.

Electricity is *definitely* cleaner there.

You need to travel to a country that produce most of its electricity by burning coal (like China) to find a situation where there isn't much difference between an ICE car and an electric one.

(And in that last situation: well if China adds more clean energy production to its power offering, all the electric car suddenly get better emissions as a consequence. Whereas all the ICE cars would need an engine swap to suddenly have better).