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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
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
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
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.
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.