China Has Launched the World's First All-Electric Cargo Ship (futurism.com)

slash.jit writes: China has launched the world's first all-electric cargo ship. It can travel 80 kilometers (approximately 50 miles) after being charged for 2 hours. As noted by Clean Technica, 2 hours is roughly the amount of time it would take to unload the ship's cargo while docked. Oh...and Ironically, the world's first all-electric cargo ship is being used to move coal.
China Daily reports that the 230 foot long vessel is equipped with a 2,400 kWh lithium-ion battery, a cheaper and cleaner power supply. And Clean Technica notes that that battery is comprised of 1,000 individual lithium-ion packs, while "Adding enough power to carry more cargo is simply a matter of adding more battery packs."

Comments

And inronically, it carries coal

[greenwow]

The article should have mentioned that.

Re:Batteries Wear Out

[Rei]

A vehicle is not its fuel/battery; you have to look at the whole picture. When you electrify a vehicle of any kind, you add some things and remove others (and also change how it's built - batteries add some structural support and can be located anywhere, which frees up design constraints in other regards). As an example, the Model 3 SR is almost the exact same weight as the similar-powered, similar-sized BMW 330i.

If you tried to make, say, nonstop transpacific cargo ships with li-ion batteries, that would be a non-starter. Even nonstop transatlantic would be priced out of the market, with huge capital costs and low cargo capacity. However, for legs under around 2000km or so, electrified freight shipping should be highly competitive. I don't expect it to take off quickly, if only for the reason that it'll take time for battery production to scale up that far. But already it should be a winner from a cost perspective. That doesn't mean you can't do transoceanic shipping - you can - but it also requires deepwater wind and/or floating solar (and / or, obviously, island stops).

There are a couple interesting side benefits as well. One, ports have to have large battery buffers (several to several dozen GWh for a port dealing with large cargo ships), which trickle charge from the grid and use that to surge charge ships. But these buffers do double-duty; they'd also buffer generation and demand fluctuations onshore, to a tremendous degree. In an emergency you could even have ships haul energy over a several hundred kilometers to places in power emergencies; when you run the numbers, you find that the rent on the ships should be quite justifiable if there's a power emergency somewhere (such as after a natural disaster). A large cargo ship might carry a gigawatt hour or so each, which is massive.

Another side effect relates to design. You can use as many, smaller propellers as you want (to gain this advantage, some ICE ships run generators alongside / instead of direct drive, just to be able to do this), since efficient electric motors are much more compact and easier to locate anywhere vs. ICEs. This helps lower your draft (shallower ports become more accessible) and makes the ship much more maneuverable. The extreme end is that of azipods - electric motors on azimuth mounts which can rotate any direction as needed. An increase in the number of propellers also increases ship resilience against accidents / damage.