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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."
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."
Wind powered ships with sails and shit
Because at least check China produces about 80% of it's power generation from burning coal.
http://www.chinafaqs.org/issue/coal-electricity
Remember: never trust some bullshit click bail green washing headline when you can easily check the facts for yourself.
The article should have mentioned that.
As of 2016, it was down to 2/3rds. Like everywhere else, China's grid is changing fast.
"This wallpaper is killing me. One of us has got to go." -- Oscar Wilde on his deathbed
Yes, because internal combustion engines are made from fairy dust, and petroleum appears out of thin air.
People who complain about the horrors of lithium mining simply demonstrate that they have no clue how lithium is actually produced. The majority of the world's lithium supply is produced from salar brine. Look at it. The horror. The horror, right? They pump brine up to the surface into ponds, let it dry out to deposit unwanted salts (leaving a lithium-rich concentrate), then send that for refining. On many salars, the entire salar floods annually, wiping out the evaporation ponds, which they have to rebuild. Nature literally reclaims the "mine" annually. Its hard to picture a less environmentally impacting resource production process.
The remainder of lithium is produced from spodumene. Spodumene mines are listed as having no particular environmental impacts associated with them apart from the general impacts of hard-rock mining; the largest impact risk is listed as suspended solids in waterways - aka, silt from the rock crushers. Which is a risk from anything that crushes rock.
Do I even need to mention that there's not actually that much lithium in lithium-ion batteries, or that - as large boxes full of useful minerals - recycling rates will be nearly 100%?
And coal is in the progress of being replaced with solar and wind, whether you like that or not. In China, in the EU, and in the US. Some places have some other types of power that are also on the rise - for example, in the US it's "wind, solar, and natural gas" - but coal is in a death spiral everywhere.
"This wallpaper is killing me. One of us has got to go." -- Oscar Wilde on his deathbed
That's because A) they've been undergoing an exponential scaleup, meaning the quantities didn't become meaningful until recently, and B) it takes time to replace an entire electrical generation system. In 2016 alone China installed 35GW of solar capacity, for example, nearly doubling their total (coal is 943GW currently installed). It's clear that it's only a matter of time.
"This wallpaper is killing me. One of us has got to go." -- Oscar Wilde on his deathbed
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.
"This wallpaper is killing me. One of us has got to go." -- Oscar Wilde on his deathbed
A large portion of China's solar power deployment is west of the industrial heartland, in the high deserts, connected to cities by HVDC lines. Furthermore, solar panels don't "breathe"; most pollutants don't affect them, and nor do they care about whether PM is fine/health effecting, or natural coarse PM blown up from the ground. Solar farms are cleaned regularly for a reason.
Whether you like it or not, this is happening. Already is happening, continues happening, the rate keeps accelerating, and the fundamentals support the rate to continue accelerating. The sooner you get used to these facts, the better.
"This wallpaper is killing me. One of us has got to go." -- Oscar Wilde on his deathbed
They're not stupid, you know.
They probably have a windmill generator on the roof, so as they speed through the ocean the wind recharges the batteries. If they go super fast, the extra generated power is used to create bitcoin, which in turn pays for the cost of the batteries and windmill.
Very clever those Chinese!
...omphaloskepsis often...
Feeding slaves is expensive, unless they learn to eat coal.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Oh...and Ironically, the world's first all-electric cargo ship is being used to move coal.
Like an op-ed written by a self-righteous ninth grader.
I understand the poster's frustration, but there are lots of great reasons to use coal as a load for the first test of a rechargeable ship. (I refuse to call it an electric ship, there have been diesel-electric propulsion systems on ships, as railway locomotives, for decades.)
You don't test your new server in production on your client's most important website, right?
If the rechargeable ship works out - no battery fires, especially! - then it might start to be used to carry heavier or more valuable cargo, like iron ore, then maybe even refitted for something else.
And if the technology works out, the rechargeable ship would be *amazing* for a short-hop ferry service, especially in an urban area where air pollution is a problem.
Ya gotta be able to crawl before you can walk, and walk before you can run. This is at the crawling stage. But it's encouraging.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
1) It's not even remotely close to the limit of what's possible. Within orders of magnitude.
2) It's designed for a specific, 50mi trip, not go to on arbitrary routes. Most coliers are.
3) It probably was pretty darn cheap. The battery should be around $300k, which for a collier... that's nothing.
4) Staffing should be the same or less. There's not much really to operate.
5) It should be significantly cheaper per unit distance traveled; electricity is cheaper than oil, by a good margin. It should also be more maneuverable.
6) Only 2/3rds of Chinese electricity is coal, and that number falls every year.
7) A battery of this size should be about 8 cubic meters. Hardly "hull fulling".
"This wallpaper is killing me. One of us has got to go." -- Oscar Wilde on his deathbed
Run the propeller with waste heat from the bitcoin miners.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
It's a container ship. Now, if only someone could think of a way to install and uninstall battery capacity quickly and easily, and what to do with those batteries while they're sitting there in the sun not being used...
It's a container ship. Now, if only someone could think of a way to install and uninstall battery capacity quickly and easily, and what to do with those batteries while they're sitting there in the sun not being used...
It's a bulker, don't look at that picture at the top of the article. (For one thing, the ship is only 200-something feet long, isn't a standard cointainer 53'?)
I'm sure the batteries are below her belt, (indirectly) cooled by the water. And why would you need to change battery capacity quickly? She'll be doing the same route her entire life. They can probably change out a faulty group of cells very quickly and easily any time she's in port, and probably even while she's under way.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Thankfully, electric motors powered 100% by coal power plants still produce far less CO2 than diesel engines on board ship.
Yeh, its not like water ever just falls from the sky, and cleans the panels.
3 years in im still getting full output from my panels, which have never been cleaned other than by nature.
They produce all my power needs, including Air cond.
Hoe are thing back in the 20th century?
Oh...and Ironically, the world's first all-electric cargo ship is being used to move coal.
Like an op-ed written by a self-righteous ninth grader.
Wait till he finds out that the ships used to transport lithium-ion batteries are fueled by elephant tusks and rhino horns.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Rail. Adding greater fuel capacity has no impact on freight capacity. Up to the practical limit on length of the train, of course.
Remember: never trust some bullshit click bail green washing headline when you can easily check the facts for yourself.
Yeah, about that... Let's look at this "China FAQs" site you linked to. If you just go to the front page we see a series of stories...
Chinaâ(TM)s Decline in Coal Consumption Drives Global Slowdown in Emissions
China is Leaving the U.S. Behind on Clean Energy Investment
So according to those two (literally the two most recent headlines) China is actually doing quite a lot to stop using coal (its consumption actually peaked a few years ago and is in decline), more so than the world's other big polluter in fact.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Because at least check China produces about 80% of it's power generation from burning coal.
So what's your point? That China can never experiment with new motive power sources because coal?
That the laws of physics tell us that only coal generated electricity can run this ship?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.