Sustainable Cargo Ships

[TheTalkingMule]

Like most people here the inherent logic associated with solar production and EV consumption appeals to me. In the automobile world there is obviously insufficient surface area to add any meaningful amount of solar to a car, but on the open sea....

Cargo ships traditionally chugged along at 25 knots, then brought it down to 20 knots for efficiency's sake once oil got expensive. At the peak of high oil prices, a lot of these operators will cruising at a mere 12 knots or 14mph. At that speed you're essentially leisure sailing. Sail technology has been proven to have great potential in the shipping world, but what about solar?

The Pacific Ocean covers 1/3 of the Earth's surface and plastics float on it. What's to stop a cargo line from trailing a half mile thin-film solar array to charge a massive battery pack? Thin film is manufactured in a roll-to-roll fashion, so why not simply create a light weight protective layer and deploy a few mega rolls off the back of a cargo ship?

Anyone want to take a stab at the array's surface area requirements to move a fully loaded cargo ship purely via electric motors? You'd need what.....40k horsepower? Massive kite sails can certainly assist(and add tons of speed) when traveling in the direction of trade winds.

 

[PaulRocket]

An interesting link:
'Vindskip' cargo ship uses its hull as a giant sail - CNN.com

 

[Brando]

Like most people here the inherent logic associated with solar production and EV consumption appeals to me. In the automobile world there is obviously insufficient surface area to add any meaningful amount of solar to a car, but on the open sea....

Cargo ships traditionally chugged along at 25 knots, then brought it down to 20 knots for efficiency's sake once oil got expensive. At the peak of high oil prices, a lot of these operators will cruising at a mere 12 knots or 14mph. At that speed you're essentially leisure sailing. Sail technology has been proven to have great potential in the shipping world, but what about solar?

The Pacific Ocean covers 1/3 of the Earth's surface and plastics float on it. What's to stop a cargo line from trailing a half mile thin-film solar array to charge a massive battery pack? Thin film is manufactured in a roll-to-roll fashion, so why not simply create a light weight protective layer and deploy a few mega rolls off the back of a cargo ship?

Anyone want to take a stab at the array's surface area requirements to move a fully loaded cargo ship purely via electric motors? You'd need what.....40k horsepower? Massive kite sails can certainly assist(and add tons of speed) when traveling in the direction of trade winds.

Sails with thin film solar

 

[mspohr]

EV shipping is set to blow internal combustion engines out of the water

Modeling 5 to 10 GWh electrified containerships, researchers find that 40% of routes today could be electrified in an economically viable manner, before considering environmental costs.

pv-magazine-usa.com

Crucially, this research demonstrates that electrified containerships have an economic advantage over the internal combustion engine (ICE), even when the costs of environmental and health damages are excluded.

After modeling a wide variety of containership sizes, as well as 13 major world trade routes, the research suggests that more than 40% of the world’s fleet of containerships could be electrified “cost-effectively and with current technology,” by the end of this decade.

 

[ThomasD]

So around 20,000 ships could be electrified. That would be a lot of cargo vessels. How many Cargo vessels could be charged at once at the Port Of LA?

 

[mspohr]

So around 20,000 ships could be electrified. That would be a lot of cargo vessels. How many Cargo vessels could be charged at once at the Port Of LA?

Looks like they have about 15 ships a day