> You will need a very reliable supply of energy for this.
Solar is extremely reliable as long as you have an oversupply when all you want to to charge batteries. At sub 2c/kWh it’s highly variable but build in 50% extra and you’re only at 3c/kWh and now very consistent across a full week. Obviously, there’s varying tradeoffs so if the cheapest solution is to stick them on a boat and charge em in another country that’s what would end up happening. There’s also obviously tradeoffs between moving shipping containers vs moving electricity but again that’s an optimization problem not some inherent limitation.
Skysail isn’t viable at current fuel prices, the technology works just fine. Current sail designs are of limited value along current routes, but those routes are also optimized for fossil fuels.
Club Med 2 built on 1992 was 15,000 tons and a quite traditional design for aesthetics, again Skysail can significantly boost propulsion. Thousands of economically viable modern cargo ships are 50,000 ton panamax ships and plenty are well below that, those 250,000 ton monsters are an economic optimization between a handful of major ports not some inherent requirement.
The total crew size is largely independent of cargo size, but even relatively small ships are moving 100’s of TEU per worker. At that point it’s only a question of what’s the most efficient design economically not what’s the largest ship.
Uh no. You are looking at a 20% load factor with solar, plus massive seasonal variations. It is completely non-doable with batteries.
Seriously, you seem like someone who is obsessed with doing it with batteries, not a person even remotely interested in finding a working solution.
Meanwhile, the alternative, just making hydrogen with the same renewable energy source and powering your ships with it, is sitting right there as an obvious answer. If you already admit to the existence of $0.02/kWh electricity, then the rest of the cost equation is also going to be low here. You've already solved the economics of the issue. The rest is scaling up, and this time there is no need for sails or downsizing ships.
Do you forget what we were trying to do? The explicit goal is charging batteries in 40’ containers and clearly PV isn’t working at night so what matters is consistency during the daytime. A flat panel on a rotating circle has a maximum theoretical capacity of diameter/circumference = 1/pi or 31.847…% on earth it’s more complicated due to axial tilt etc, but what matters is how consistent the output per day not the number of minutes per day we’re getting power.
Real world capacity factor Capacity factor 27.9% (average 2017-2019) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper_Mountain_Solar_Facility that’s surprisingly close to the theoretical maximum for the location and design. Some break 30% but again it’s not about maximizing output just how much it cost to guarantee we can fill X TEU worth of shipping containers per ~week. Thus it don’t matter if there a 18 hour period one day when they aren’t being charged as long as you can charge enough on average.
> Meanwhile, the alternative, just making hydrogen
Sure let’s pay vastly more per gallon that’s an easy selling point. Hydrogen has maximum limits imposed by physics that severely limit end to end efficiency. It’s a dangerous bitch to store, transport etc. Low density, damages metals it comes in contact with etc, even rocketry got away from the stuff even though it has significant advantages for them.
Nobody is using the stuff because it’s got huge problems.
Have you forgotten what your goal is? It is to get ships to zero emissions. Not force a physically nonsensical idea onto the shipping world.
You've already admitted that solar is just $0.02/kWh. You can do the rest of the math and realize that hydrogen will also be very cheap. You're entirely thinking in cliches now. It is "battery = cheap, hydrogen = expensive" despite your own argument contradicting that claim.
In reality, people will just some kind of chemical fuels. If not hydrogen directly, then something derived from it like ammonia or synfuels. It is already happening in fact, and your obsession simply won't happen.
I call green hydrogen expensive because that’s what it actually costs today. There’s a reason we only get 4% of hydrogen from electrolysis, it costs more than using fossil fuels.
Look at hydrogen fuel station pricing sometimes even using fossil fuels and compare costs vs bunker fuel. There’s projections it could possibly get close to US gas prices in 20 years, but that includes road taxes, high refining costs, transportation, etc and are therefore much higher than bunker fuel actually used by boats. So the optimistic projections are doubling a ship’s fuel costs and current prices are much higher than that.
As to your “nonsensical idea” complaint, companies actually saving companies money today using it. This isn’t some hypothetical, actual ships on the ocean are using large scale batteries to save on fuel costs. Further, the absolute largest car carrier in the world is smaller than the largest sailing vessel ever built, they load and unload from the front so sticking sails on top wouldn’t be a problem. Fossil fuels are cheap, but hydrogen isn’t viable today which is why ships aren’t using it and it’s not projected to be viable for decades. Anyone who tried using hydrogen would simply be eaten alive by the competition.
You could've said the same thing about anything before it hits mass production. Wind and solar were expensive too at one point. It is not much of an argument.
The thing about hydrogen is that is made from an extremely plentiful resource: water + green energy. That puts the cost floor at below that of bunker fuel. In fact, the cost floor is pretty close to zero. So you are basically repeating the generic "renewable resources can never be cheap" argument. But it has been discredited.
Nobody uses anything like a battery powered ship for long distance travel. You are making up imaginary scenarios.
Clean energy isn’t free nor is the actual infrastructure required. Round trip efficiency for hydrogen is currently ~18% excluding horrifically expensive fuel cells which are completely off the table for these ships. On top of this you got to pay for the infrastructure to actually make the hydrogen + infrastructure to store the stuff + the increased costs of building ships to handle it.
Even optimistic estimates put Hydrogen well above bunker fuel.
> Nobody is using anything like a battery powered ship for long distance travel.
Cargo ships with hot swapping batteries are already in use. At that point it’s Europe to Asia is an infrastructure problem not a research problem. People hope to eventually solve Hydrogen’s issues with production and storage but have made minimal progress over the last 20 years. Just because we want technology to work doesn’t mean it’s actually possible to build it.
Hell just look at how much people have hyped up Nuclear as a source of cheap electricity as long as we invest in more R&D. Except even with huge investments in new designs etc there’s been zero actual progress in lowering costs.
Clean energy is regularly free or even negatively priced. It is at the very least, extremely cheap. It's funny how PV panels at 20% efficiency never stopped it from catching on. Making the same accusation against hydrogen is just repeating this already debunked argument.
The whole infrastructure for hydrogen will just repurpose or modify natural gas infrastructure. It is not expensive. It will be vastly cheaper than trying to do it entirely with batteries. And without any resource constraints, it is guaranteed to eventually be cheaper than bunker fuel. Again, you are repeating anti-wind and anti-solar argument the past. If those technologies plunged to nearly nothing in cost, why would the next renewable technology that relies on an extremely plentiful substance be any different?
Finally, you're entering into the "I'm just making this shit up" phase of your argument. People have already made ships to run on hydrogen. Something similar has happened with a variety of other green fuels like methanol, ammonia, etc. None of this is even that challenging of a problem. The only thing that is proving to be hard is trying to power everything with a battery. It is totally nuts for ships, and that's even before realizing how much it costs.
FYI, nuclear has been killed off due to legislation, many due to fears over radioactive waste. But hydrogen and other chemical fuels have no such concerns. It will scale the same as wind and solar did.
> People have already made ships to run on hydrogen.
Only at a significant loss. You can go out and buy a hydrogen powered car today and pay more for the car, have worse range, pay more for energy to move that car, and have to deal with limited infrastructure. People are operating battery powered boats at a profit, that’s a monumental difference.
Limiting yourself to “free” for electricity means spending more money on equipment. Actually making industrial scale hydrogen requires expensive electrolysis equipment and having that sit idle 95% of the time is expensive independent of electricity costs. Similarly aiming for seasonal storage requires investment in storage so it’s there when you want it. This isn’t free and no you can’t just reuse natural gas systems, even just detecting small leaks requires different equipment, the demand is higher, hydrogen embrittlement is a serious problem, and the energy density is different.
You can consistently get ~3c/kWh for close to 8 hours a day via building your solar farm, but that means your electrolysis equipment is still idle 66% of the time and your still paying 3c/0.18 = 16.7c/kWh just for electricity ignoring other costs to get 1kWh of useful energy at the end.
This is why Hydrogen is currently expensive, until something fundamentally changes with the underlying economics due to new technology it’s going to stay expensive.
Nuclear has both economic and risk issue. Legislation impacted individual countries but a handful are built each year. It’s not even just disasters, several nuclear projects have gone wildly over budget scaring both small countries and free market investors. The risks are high even ignoring accidents and the rewards don’t match those risks.
That said, I acknowledge politics has played a role it’s simply not the most important one. Japan was happy with nuclear until an unexpected 500 dollar bill, other countries look at that and get concerned.
Because prototype vehicles are not supposed to be profit centers. The fact that now you are shifting to cars shows how uninterested you were in this topic to begin with.
Please stop making shit up. We already have seen people reuse or at least test natural gas infrastructure with hydrogen. There are no showstopper problems. It is a fully solvable problem and is going to happen.
You literally are making up your own fictional scenario to rationalize how you can disconnect $0.02/kWh electricity from cheap hydrogen. This is pure incoherent rubbish.
Ultimately, you are creating an alternative reality to rationalize your delusion that batteries can power anything while nothing else can. No fucking idea why are you ranting about nuclear safety either. It is one of the safest energy sources out there.
> Because prototype vehicles are not supposed to be profit centers.
Hydrogen systems still being classified as prototypes after decades of research should tell you something. Nobody is making hydrogen boats because they’re simply inferior in just about every conceivable way. Cars got heavily subsidized, billions in R&D over decades, and are a failure. Hydrogen boats aren’t even vaguely worth trying to bring to market.
Economics uncovers bullshit, you can’t hand wave away the cost of infrastructure, someone needs to pay to create and maintain it. Solar can hit 2c/kWh for a few hours per day in a few areas of the globe, but now you’re both idling infrastructure and stuck with long distance transportation of Hydrogen and or electricity which has their own associated costs. Just do X sounds great, but doing X always has associated costs.
For comparison, including transportation and all other overhead bunker fuel gives you ~15c/kWh after you burn it, though this varies a lot. It’s horrifyingly polluting, but dirt cheap.
Scale alone isn’t going to fix green hydrogen it requires a fundamental breakthrough.
And BEVs are well over a hundred years old. You are so fucking dishonest, it's seriously painful talking to you. You didn't even register the part where I said hydrogen boats already exist. You aren't even trying to have a conversation about green shipping. It's all just about more BEV marketing from you. Everything you say can be a lie to further this goal.
Seriously, who do you work for? I can't imagine you not having an agenda here.
Cars are meaningful because they clearly demonstrate current Hydrogen pricing and technical issues.
Economics isn’t rubbish. Yes you can get X kWh at below Yc/kWh every month, *as long as you are willing to let equipment sit mostly idle. My point about 3c/kWh is simply the point where you can both operate equipment 1/3 of the time in most locations thus minimizing transmission issues, and you aren’t limited by the surplus of the local electricity grid. It’s simply a point of comparison. Sure, you can get
Include overhead and green hydrogen generation is currently dramatically more expensive and it needs drastic efficiency gains to be viable. That’s simply the truth.
Your only input is your super cheap electricity and water. Your own logic dictates that hydrogen must be cheap. Scaling up is the only thing that has to happen.
You should stop doing logical backflips and making nonsensical comparisons.
Solar is extremely reliable as long as you have an oversupply when all you want to to charge batteries. At sub 2c/kWh it’s highly variable but build in 50% extra and you’re only at 3c/kWh and now very consistent across a full week. Obviously, there’s varying tradeoffs so if the cheapest solution is to stick them on a boat and charge em in another country that’s what would end up happening. There’s also obviously tradeoffs between moving shipping containers vs moving electricity but again that’s an optimization problem not some inherent limitation.
Skysail isn’t viable at current fuel prices, the technology works just fine. Current sail designs are of limited value along current routes, but those routes are also optimized for fossil fuels.
Club Med 2 built on 1992 was 15,000 tons and a quite traditional design for aesthetics, again Skysail can significantly boost propulsion. Thousands of economically viable modern cargo ships are 50,000 ton panamax ships and plenty are well below that, those 250,000 ton monsters are an economic optimization between a handful of major ports not some inherent requirement.
The total crew size is largely independent of cargo size, but even relatively small ships are moving 100’s of TEU per worker. At that point it’s only a question of what’s the most efficient design economically not what’s the largest ship.