71–80 of 205 posts
I suspect that there's niches where battery electric boats and maybe planes do make sense. My state's ferry system is investing in electrifying, because they project it reduce operating costs. The 'easy' part is moving towards hybrid systems that can move with diesel or battery; this is projected to save fuel even without shore charging. The hard part will be making shore charging work. Our grid is mostly hydro, so s…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
With a fraction of the money, you pay for energy to move faster ...
That's not even close to true for the kind of large shipping we're talking about. Crews are small (the Ever Given had 25 people on board) but the ships they crew take up to ~100k gallons of fuel per day (Ever Given has a fuel capacity of 3622168.679 gallons, 13711400 liters, and is set up for voyages of ~30 days underway). Fuel costs are ~$2.5 USD/gallon for bunker fuel. That means a cool $200k per day (conservativel…
Backup argument: if you go at half-speed, you'll need twice as many ships for the same throughput.
In a car for example, you need about 9 gallons of gas in a 33mpg car to get 300 miles. This is equivalent to a 75kWh EV.
On paper though, with the conveniently leaving out details math this guy is using (or maybe it's too physics for him) you only need 2.2 gallons.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because floating solar panels add drag proportional to their area, and it takes a lot of area of panels to power a motor that is sufficient for a cargo ship even without the added drag of the panels. Also, because oceans and the things one runs into in them aren't easy on solar panels being dragged along by cargo ships.
My understanding is that drag is more about the "front-on" view of a craft than how long the craft is. Since solar panels are very thin and aimed up, it feels like they add minimal cross-sectional area to the craft. Your assertion seems trivially incorrect to me?
https://www.regentcraft.com/news/regent-begins-sea-trials-of...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It just takes money. $100k-$300k/yr is plenty to have your pick of pretty good people, especially if there are any perks like the food being halfway decent (should be basically a given if you have to pay the chef a lot anyway).
With a fraction of the money, you pay for energy to move faster ...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Incompetence can take many forms. Some of them include starting a fight they can't finish.
I chose those examples specifically because they were completely successful.
I recently read The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson, and one of the ideas in it that I thought was very good was replacing our cargo ships with wind-powered ships, basically giant sailing ships. In the book, they were incredibly slow, with shipments taking months to complete, but if supply lines were set up correctly, that wouldn't matter for a lot of cargo. Cargo ships are a massive CO2 contributor,…
Or Nuclear Propulsion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_marine_propulsion#Merc... > Nuclear ships are currently the responsibility of their own countries, but none are involved in international trade. As a result of this work in 2014 two papers on commercial nuclear marine propulsion were published by Lloyd's Register and the other members of this consortium.... > This is a small fast-neutron reactor using lead–…
- The construction cost would be significantly higher than a conventional ship.
- Reactors are far from trivial, so you'd double or triple the crew required.
- Shipbreaking would become even more of an issue than it already is. You can't just beach a ship like this in Bangladesh and have a bunch of untrained people attack it with plasma cutters.
- The ship would be a huge target for pirates and terrorists. It's essentially a floating dirty bomb, after all, just waiting for the USS Cole treatment.
- A lot of countries would not accept nuclear ships, both due to perceived security risks and for more ideological reasons.
... and that's probably only the tip of the iceberg.
Nuclear is barely economically viable with land-based large-scale nuclear power plants running for 50+ years. They are an attractive option for some military ships, but I doubt anyone would be willing to risk it for regular commercial shipping.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why can't cargo ships deploy floating solar panels to power the ship motors?
Interesting idea, but that would require more than a square kilometer (or a 100m strip 10km long) of solar panels (not accounting for the additional power required to tow the panel array).
You see solar panels added to a wide range of boats because even bunker fuel isn’t free and panels are light for the power they provide over even a few days. A current 399.9 * 61.3m container ship doesn’t need panels everywhere to benefit, but the potential savings is significant if they do.
Setting aside individual problems with it, this is because it suffers from a broad and blindingly obvious problem: investment is occurring in this area b/c it will be absolutely politically unpalatable in 20 years to still be emitting CO2.
A long analysis showing lithium is more expensive than just using gas is unnecessary, and not even wrong when its used to prove VCs are dumb or whatever.
Things are going to get that bad. Mark my words. It's like how it was obvious COVID was going to be a pandemic after January 2020. You could derive it from basic #s.
They're not looking to be cheaper-than.