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

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

#41

Post by throwaway173738 »

wongarsu wrote: post #25
__sy__ wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

It's DHL. If you want your package or pallet shipped to some island it might take a long while until a big container ship makes the next stop there. If it can stop there at all. For a package/freight company, the capability to run ships on your schedule to small harbors is valuable. And a catamaran could be a competitive alternative to other smaller container ships What I don't understand is that they are talking abo…

You might not need much crew for a vessel that small. Automation can take care of most of it, and with the right equipment the ship can basically sail itself. Then you just need a captain and maybe some maintenance crew to keep the automation running.

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

#42

Post by meristohm »

jeffbee wrote: post #8

20 years ago I read this magazine article about putting kites on container ships for efficiency. This gadget seems to have durable appeal to entrepreneurs and/or suckers. https://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2005/09/17/sa... The company recently went bankrupt, by the way. It turns out that gigantic container ships are already incredibly efficient.

Incredibly efficient, but if they're burning hydrocarbons to move, at scale they are incredibly damaging to earth's atmosphere, and to animals disrupted by engine and propeller noise.

International trade is wonderful, all this new tech we're drowning in is amazing, and- understand that every one of us will eventually die, hopefully passing on some positive influence to others along the way, and that it turns out opting for the new car, the big climate-controlled house, the weekly/monthly/annual/still-too-frequent long-distance flights/drives, the new pocket computer every few years, the fancy unnecessarily-powerful laptop, the hours spent on all the man-child hobbies because we haven't outgrown our childhood insecurities, all this is an incredible waste compared to the meaning derived from healthy relationships with people within walking distance, tending the land we get our food from.

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

#43

Post by niwtsol »

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/

I dont know what I was expecting on the roadmap page after you said it was not a roadmap, but I did not expect to see a whale jumping over a human as part of the "roadmap"

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

#44

Post by phtrivier »

> The boats are still being built, but Vela said it hopes to have five trimarans operating by 2030 to meet its once-a-week shipment goal.

Why is it always like this ?

"Slight improvement to be delivered in beta in a 5 years for limited users at premium prices.

Meanwhile, the latest catastrophe auto-updated 4 times while you were reading."

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

#45

Post by scottlamb »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #14
bluGill wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

As I understand it, Hawaii had environmental concerns with ferries (requiring a review that was never completed), specifically whale/ship strikes and the risk of car-carrying ferries transporting invasive species between the islands. [1] I'm unsure if other islands would have similar concerns about cargo ships or not or if the environmental review would have been satisfactory if they'd just done it on time.

I'd expect ferries and/or small cargo ships to be an attractive option if allowed.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaii_Superferry

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

#46

Post by somat »

What if we put a large wind turbine on a ship? A sort of modern set of sails if you will.

A mid sized cargo ship has a 50_000Kw engine. A mid sized offshore wind turbine makes 1_000_000Kw. So depending on which way the wind is blowing it could work. Put a diesel electric drive and a full sized engine then use the wind turbine to see how much it could reduce fuel use. I was even having fun dreaming about the incidentals. how hard it would be to build a folding/quick assembly mechanism for the turbine to make harbor/bridge/crane access problems go away. could we duel purpose the wind turbine boom as a crane boom. Would a vertical turbine make sense?

While reading up on wind turbines I ran across the depressing story of the small ferry Hornblower Hybrid. A lot of hype on how environmentally friendly it was in 2008 when it was retrofitted with two vertical turbines. But my first though was "those turbines look awful small" and they are, the best they could do is power the lights not the boat itself. The boat itself was retro fitted in 2024 and lost it's electric drive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornblower_Hybrid

I bet even if it would work from an energy point of view, the extra complexity of the system would make it more expensive than a straight diesel ship from an operations and maintenance point of view.

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

#47

Post by jeffbee »

meristohm wrote: post #42
jeffbee wrote: post #8

20 years ago I read this magazine article about putting kites on container ships for efficiency. This gadget seems to have durable appeal to entrepreneurs and/or suckers. https://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2005/09/17/sa... The company recently went bankrupt, by the way. It turns out that gigantic container ships are already incredibly efficient.

Incredibly efficient, but if they're burning hydrocarbons to move, at scale they are incredibly damaging to earth's atmosphere, and to animals disrupted by engine and propeller noise. International trade is wonderful, all this new tech we're drowning in is amazing, and- understand that every one of us will eventually die, hopefully passing on some positive influence to others along the way, and that it turns out opti…

Shipping uses so little energy that switching it to synthetic liquid fuels while we figure out something else is plausible. More plausible than reverting the fleet to 2000x more sailing vessels.

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

#48

Post by marcosdumay »

somat wrote: post #46

What if we put a large wind turbine on a ship? A sort of modern set of sails if you will. A mid sized cargo ship has a 50_000Kw engine. A mid sized offshore wind turbine makes 1_000_000Kw. So depending on which way the wind is blowing it could work. Put a diesel electric drive and a full sized engine then use the wind turbine to see how much it could reduce fuel use. I was even having fun dreaming about the incidenta…

There are several designs of kite propelled ships. Some commercially available.

A generator and a propeller would only add weight and complexity for a loss in efficiency.

There have also been ships with vertical turbines mechanically coupled to propellers. But you can't build them very tall, so you lose the best winds. Those haven't been good enough in the past.

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

#49

Post by eesmith »

WorkerBee28474 wrote: post #33
jeffbee wrote: post #8

20 years ago I read this magazine article about putting kites on container ships for efficiency. This gadget seems to have durable appeal to entrepreneurs and/or suckers. https://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2005/09/17/sa... The company recently went bankrupt, by the way. It turns out that gigantic container ships are already incredibly efficient.

Another version of the idea is still around: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotor_ship

I first learned about it in the 1980s, in an issue of Popular Science. Ahh, this 1984 issue of PopSci - https://archive.org/details/popular-science-1984-no.-1/mode/... .

Ohh, a year previous PopSci talked about using the Magnus effect for wind turbine blades. https://archive.org/details/popular-science-1983-no.-8/mode/...

In any case, it's another gadget which "seems to have durable appeal to entrepreneurs and/or suckers."

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