DHL Set to Transport Goods on New Wind-Powered Cargo Ships • Hacker News Board

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

#51

Post by eesmith » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 7:56 PM UTC

mmooss wrote: post #40

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.

> This gadget seems to have durable appeal to entrepreneurs and/or suckers. Or most research and technological development requires years or generations of experimentation and failure before success. And every time, the creators and innovators are told they are wasting their time, suckers, look how many failures came before you, ...

Consider the steam powered airplane. It required decades of experimentation and failure before success, and that technical success was a dead-end.

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

#52

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 8:00 PM UTC

ffsm8 wrote: post #35

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…

Urm, it's pretty well documented that historically the biggest deciding factor in shipping is cost. The size of the vessel and the travel speed are unimportant vs cost of the journey. So if they can essentially remove fuel cost, they're able to reduce the shipping cost and hence outcompete bigger vessels on the only metric that had historically mattered in that industry

[deleted]

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

#53

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 8:35 PM UTC

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…

[deleted]

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

#54

Post by rayiner » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 8:36 PM UTC

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…

> Not sure why the article decided to compare cargo capacity of a airplane with the length of a container ship, but alas.

Because journalism is plagued by innumeracy. Same reason the author is talking about the length of cargo ships instead of the volume.

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

#55

Post by CodeWriter23 » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 8:39 PM UTC

citrin_ru wrote: post #29

CodeWriter23 wrote: post #13

> "The wind-powered boats could be especially appealing when oil prices have shot up because of the Iran war." Check of oil prices same day article was published: WTI $73.51/bbl BRENT $77.57/bbl MURBAN: $70.46/bbl

What we see in quotes is not the price of oil being shipped right now; it is usually a one-month futures contract. Traders expect that by this time, Hormuz will reopen. If it does not, they will lose money, but the actual price could be much higher.

Close to the bottom price over the past 5 years is what it is.

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

#56

Post by mmooss » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 9:43 PM UTC

eesmith wrote: post #51

mmooss wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This gadget seems to have durable appeal to entrepreneurs and/or suckers. Or most research and technological development requires years or generations of experimentation and failure before success. And every time, the creators and innovators are told they are wasting their time, suckers, look how many failures came before you, ...

Consider the steam powered airplane. It required decades of experimentation and failure before success, and that technical success was a dead-end.

Consider the airplane.

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

#57

Post by calmbonsai » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 11:01 PM UTC

mmooss wrote: post #39

calmbonsai wrote: post #19

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…

That sounds so familiar. I swear I once read the same comment about renewable energy generation. :)

They performance potential was always there for solar and wind energy. It was a known quantity that was an engineering inevitability.

The industrial scale-up just happened quickly since the same tech could be leveraged from chip manufacturing for solar and composite construction from airplanes for wind turbines.

There's no similar performance potential for wind-powered vessels over combustion-powered vessels that can be "scaled-up" and, if need be, we can make green fuel from raw materials and still economically out-perform wind vessels.

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

#58

Post by senectus1 » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 11:57 PM UTC

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…

the way the american administration is pushing for de-globalization... this might be the perfect future market.

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

#59

Post by ElijahLynn » Tue, Jun 23, 2026, 1:00 AM UTC

Oh wow, so they are only using sails?

The article seemed a bit light on actually how it's been powered.

My initial assumption was that it's just going to harvest wind out of the air to power electric turbines since there's probably so much wind at the sea so much of the time.

But there's a quote in the article that says we're going with the wind, and not in a straight line.

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

#60

Post by eesmith » Tue, Jun 23, 2026, 5:30 AM UTC

mmooss wrote: post #56

eesmith wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider the steam powered airplane. It required decades of experimentation and failure before success, and that technical success was a dead-end.

Consider the airplane.

Yes, the steam powered airplane is a dead-end branch in the development of the airplane. Unlike most of the dead-end branches, it actually worked, in a limited technical sense.

Most research and technological development fail, and most of those which succeed in a technical sense end up being worse in a practical sense than other alternatives.

There are a lot of gadgets where "the creators and innovators are told they are wasting their time, suckers, look how many failures came before you" -- and the detractors were right.

The screw-propelled vehicle, after over a century of development, has slightly more success than the steam airplane because there is a niche use as amphirols. But for nearly every case it was designed for, caterpillar tracks, half-tracks, or even tires are better.

No matter how much R&D you put into it, it seems impossible that a roller ship like the Ernest Bazin will have commercial success. Ditto the gimbaled cabin design of the SS Bessemer, meant to stave off seasickness in the passengers.

Various gadgets lie on the border where they seem tantalizingly commercially realizable, like kites on container ships. That's where kooks and hucksters thrive.