Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

DHL Set to Transport Goods on New Wind-Powered Cargo Ships

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 65 posts

Re: DHL Set to Transport Goods on New Wind-Powered Cargo Ships

#11

Post by __sy__ »

mattas wrote: post #3

"415 metric tons of goods. That means they have about five times more cargo space than an airplane, but are five times smaller in length than a typical container ship." Not to take anything away from this (it's great), but for reference, an average vessel in Maersk's fleet can carry about 100,000 metric tons so you'd need about 250 of these to replace a single container ship. Not sure why the article decided to compa…

This was my exact intuition. At 450 metric ton, we're three orders of magnitude away from what large container ships can do. It's a nice PoC but this is clearly just PR from DHL.

Air freight is also an odd comparison since it's usually time-sensitive and/or pricey ($100+ per pound).

Re: DHL Set to Transport Goods on New Wind-Powered Cargo Ships

#12

Post by zdw »

Someone should make a sport out of this.

We already have sailing sports where people race all kinds of wind-powered vessels, and they push the envelope of tech development, just like F1 and the car industry.

Also rich people love this sort of thing. Give them something to do with all that money that has some sort of chance of improving things.

Re: DHL Set to Transport Goods on New Wind-Powered Cargo Ships

#14

Post by ZeroGravitas »

bluGill wrote: post #7
mattas wrote: post #3

"415 metric tons of goods. That means they have about five times more cargo space than an airplane, but are five times smaller in length than a typical container ship." Not to take anything away from this (it's great), but for reference, an average vessel in Maersk's fleet can carry about 100,000 metric tons so you'd need about 250 of these to replace a single container ship. Not sure why the article decided to compa…

This might be useful for a tiny island. Ship from a large Caribbean island to a small one for example. The distance means the round trip is day (night?) trip, and there a things you want shipped in every day, but airplanes are expensive. I'm sure there are other niches where there is only a small amount of cargo going from point A to point B as well. However in general the world needs more cargo and so this doesn't m…

Island hopping is a niche where electric flight might get started.

Hawaii is looking at running some next year.

https://www.sfgate.com/hawaii/article/hawaii-electric-airpla...

Re: DHL Set to Transport Goods on New Wind-Powered Cargo Ships

#15

Post by lschueller »

In the big picture I am again and again fascinated by this. One of the oldest commercial services out there (post / shipping) proves repeatedly to be very innovative and strong in realization of new stuff like this. They were the first or one of the first, who deployed electrical cargo vans. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetscooter

To be accurate, they bought the startup. But still: they didn't wait for the automotive company to come up with a e cargo van.

Re: DHL Set to Transport Goods on New Wind-Powered Cargo Ships

#17

Post by mockerell »

zdw wrote: post #12

Someone should make a sport out of this. We already have sailing sports where people race all kinds of wind-powered vessels, and they push the envelope of tech development, just like F1 and the car industry. Also rich people love this sort of thing. Give them something to do with all that money that has some sort of chance of improving things.

Look no further! SailGP is pretty much the maritime version of F1

Re: DHL Set to Transport Goods on New Wind-Powered Cargo Ships

#19

Post by calmbonsai »

Let's see it last. It won't. This is just a short-term private endeavor/vanity-press project. Just because a business uses a "sustainable technology" does not make it a sustainable business. Comparing cargo ships to airplanes is apples vs. oranges and reveals the author's deliberate "headline" motivation and lack of technology understanding compared to the actual ground truth of shipping.

Until fuel prices change for the long-term and/or emissions regulations have an order of magnitude uptick as well as covering far more than sulfur (see IMO 2020 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MARPOL_73/78#IMO_2020 ), there will be zero economic incentive to use wind-power over diesel/bunker-fuel power.

And no, any advantages of docking at smaller ports are defeated by those ports having less land-transit access and we already have fleets of (smaller) cargo vessels serving these ports at insanely low $/ton/mile rates.

Just like farms, all of the economics point to larger vessels, larger ports, and operating entity consolidation. See "The Box" by Marc Levinson https://a.co/d/0gtBkWwt or watch a few "What's Going On With Shipping" https://www.youtube.com/@wgowshipping videos.

It will take some sort of global political or environmental catastrophic externality to even budge, let alone change, the status quo.

Re: DHL Set to Transport Goods on New Wind-Powered Cargo Ships

#20

Post by jeroenhd »

burkaman wrote: post #4

I love this idea, but do these ships exist yet? I can only find renderings, and the company's "roadmap" page is not a roadmap ( https://vela-transport.com/feuille-de-route/ ). The only real footage I can find is a construction video from a year ago: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DL9CSLdtkaP/

The ships aren't new, but a large transport operator like DHL buying into the concept is.

Well, unless you count pre-motor cargo ships of course, those were the only option for centuries.

Post reply on HN