China Launches First 700 TEU Electric Containership for Yangtze Service(maritime-executive.com) |
China Launches First 700 TEU Electric Containership for Yangtze Service(maritime-executive.com) |
You just stop at any station, insert your depleted batteries, click a button on the app and they give you freshly charged batteries to put back in and go.
gogoro youtube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5ddtHj_N2E
asianometry video:
The problem is charging. Charging up 4 containers worth of batteries takes a wild amount of power, we’re talking multiple orders of magnitude more than refrigerated units. By my calculations you needed about 100 days of charging on a single reefer plug. Ofcourse you can speed that up with custom charging infra, but still, the amount of total energy needed is mindbogglingly large and won’t scale easily to ships of 20 000 TEU, or even just constant visits of these 700TEU feeder ships.
https://www.scmp.com/video/scmp-originals/3168635/chinese-sm...
I suspect these ships stop fairly frequently, maybe once every few hours or once a day? I read once that containers can be loaded/unloaded at a rate of about one per minute, so “refueling”, so to speak, becomes a 5 minute to one hour job, depending how much energy is needed. I wonder how competitive that is with current ships of similar size.
The economics become better as energy density of the containers improves, for sure, though.
It can actually help with the intermittent nature of renewable electricity.
The port would need to seriously upgrade their electrical connectivity, but there’s an incentive to the grid operator as well.
Well yeah.
But batteries are the still most expensive component - much more than transmission/charging upgrades.
So if u do hot-swappable batteries, this component is only cycled once every 2-3 days, while you wait for the next ship.
Power will cost you 5-10c/kwh, and 10c/kwh for battery capex amortization ($100/kwh LFP with 100 cycles/year).
Sigh
Note, I’m not suggesting you could use the existing infra for refrigerated containers, but I am pointing out that containers that need an electrical hookup are not novel. The difference here is the current supplied via that hookup.
It could be done, but it’s currently not even close to economical. It’s still safer for the port and surrounding area than the dirty diesel they burn now.
These are river barges in the article.
The idea that shipping companies will go straight for the expensive options of as synfuel, green ammonia (the deaths alone for the crew will be horrific), or green hydrogen is absurd.