Slashdot Mirror
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."
Got apps or luddite software? APPS!
"and then my entire commute will be emission free"
Said the guy driving an electric car.
*sigh*. Electric cars cause emissions- they're just externalized at the generating station.
Lithium-ion batteries are 80-90% efficient at charging, meaning that if you have to charge a battery on the pier in order to charge the ferry (explained in TFA as necessarily to buffer to load on the grid), then your charging efficiency is about 72% (0.85**2). That means the 150KWH that you have to spend on-ferry means you have to draw 210KWH from the grid. YMMV, but here in the US that's gonna run $35-40, much more than "a cup of coffee and a waffle".
Other than the double charge loss, which stood out as kind of costly, this seems like a solid and sensible engineering project. What I'd really like to hear is someone to do a 10-year follow up on whether they met their cost estimates and what else was interesting (hopefully nothing).
Actually, in general, following up seems like a good idea. We do a lot of hyping about the future and the present, not a lot of the boring work of "hey, so what happened to $COOL_IDEA or $NEW_PROJECT?" Maybe there should be a /. category for that :-)
so sad : (
Of course it would be named after Andre-Marie Ampere, the next one will be named after Alessandro Volta, but there was a lot of resistance about naming the third one after Georg Simon Ohm.
AC
"Electric car ferries" doesn't mean an electric ferry, but a ferry for electric cars. When I read the title I think about ferries with charge stations for electric cars and not a battery powered ferry. And still no matter how you want to claim this system is zero emission, it is not. Fossil fuels are sold to fund their green initiatives. The excess of electricity produced by my countries coal plants are sold to Norway to store it in their mountains by pumping up water. It is not zero emission all they way to the source. I welcome every initiative, but as long as we have to start with fossil fuel all these initiatives mean nothing in the bigger picture.
While I don't know about the dockside battery pack idea (maybe if it's also used for grid balancing), getting more of our transportation infrastructure switched over to electric drive-train vehicles with fuel based "range extenders" is going to be a major advance for efficiency/emissions reduction. We waste an insane amount of energy with overbuilt engines that spend most of their time practically idling. It will also help ease the changeover to complete electric when we do stumble upon a battery technology that can completely replace fossil fuels.
why can't the ferry carry the combustion engine cars?
What other options did they consider? For example, physically swapping the batteries might be feasible here, rather than rapid charging which tends to wear out the battery. I wonder how a flywheel would have performed?
Oh noe! Global Warming Cooling!!
Norway has an overabundance of hydroelectric power. Hydro is by far the cheapest renewable (cheaper than coal). And, provided you have enough of it to meet or exceed your consumption, it's available on-demand, unlike wind or solar. That is, it can cover both base load and peaking load.
Unfortunately, most countries don't have such an abundance of the almost perfect renewable energy source. So they'd end up burning coal or natural gas to provide base load electricity at 40%-50% efficiency, transmitted to the ports at 98% efficiency, to charge batteries at the port at 85% efficiency, to charge batteries on the ship at 85% efficiency, for an overall cycle efficiency of 32%. At that efficiency, you might as well just keep burning diesel. Or they'd use wind at 2-3x the cost, or solar at 4-5x the cost, and it wouldn't be financially viable for ferry companies to switch from diesel to electric. (Electric trains work because they don't have to carry the electricity source with them. Ships and planes don't have that luxury.)
Someone tell me why this is impossible due to such and such or something or other they read on the Internet!
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
Why not put a nuclear reactor in the ferry? It could, at the same time charge the electric cars it transports!
And, at the same time it would reduce the radioactivity spewed out by coal plants. What's not to like?
Here is a video and a explanation how it works by Bjørn Nyland
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hT3QpkrHFf4
Surprised there are any gains to be had here. Hybrids are great for stop/start vehicles like commuter cars and especially buses, but we get losses through various inefficiencies as well. Are they really stopped/peak accelerating for long enough to get serious gains? Well, I guess so... Still seems surprising.
As for the regular ferries, if we're using batteries anyway, it seems like the fastest way to transfer the power would be to transfer the batteries.
Or go the whole hog. Forget the batteries. Just plug them in with an extension cable!
*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).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
and after you factor everything (including battery manufacture), only China and a few others (India, Australia) end up having similar emission between both types of car.
On every other country, it range from "a bit better" (like in the US - where fossils are still burned for power generation, but efficiency is better as suggested by parent poster) to "really definitely better" (like TFA's Norway or Switzerland, etc. - where power generation emits very little pollution, thanks to [alpine/cold climate] hydro, etc.)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
LOL the constant-charge high-cap batteries on shore are caches. Buffers.
But I wouldn't call them "electric".