While it sounds like the start of a joke, Australian shipmaker Incat Tasmania isn’t kidding around about electric ships. Hull 096 has started charging, although it has only 85% of the over 5,000 lithium-ion batteries it will have when complete. The ship has a 40 megawatt-hour storage system with 12 banks of batteries, each consisting of 418 modules for a total of 5,016 cells. [Vannessa Bates Ramierz] breaks it down in a recent post over on IEEE Spectrum. You can get an eyeful of the beast in the official launch video, below. The Incat Tasmania channel also has other videos about the ship.
The batteries use no racks to save weight. Good thing since they already weigh in at 250 tonnes. Of course, cooling is a problem, too. Each module has a fan, and special techniques prevent one hot cell from spreading. Charging in Australia comes from a grid running 100% renewable energy. When the ship enters service as a ferry between Argentina and Uruguay, a 40-minute charge will be different. Currently, Uruguay has about 92% of its power from renewable sources. Argentina still uses mostly natural gas, but 42% of its electricity is sourced from renewable generation.
The ship is 130 meters (426 feet) long, mostly aluminum, and has a reported capacity of 2,100 people and 225 vehicles per trip. Ferry service is perfect for electric ships — the distance is short, and it’s easy to schedule time to charge. Like all electric vehicles, though, the batteries won’t stay at full capacity for long. Typical ship design calls for a 20-year service life, and it’s not uncommon for a vessel to remain in service for 30 or even 40 years. But experts expect the batteries on the ferry will need to be replaced every 5 to 10 years.
While electric ferries may become common, we don’t expect to see electric cargo ships plying the ocean soon. Diesel is hard to beat for compact storage and high energy density. There are a few examples of cargo ships using electric, though. Of course, that doesn’t mean you can’t build your own electric watercraft.
Not a maritime expert by any means but isn’t weight at a premium in boats? I thought that’s why electric boats haven’t picked up. Wouldn’t a lithium pack reduce the weight the boat can handle
I came here to say basically the opposite. Ships need ballast. Are batteries dense enough, or there’s still a need for development into higher density batteries?
Maybe we can exploit iodine chemistry there.
I saw some small boats come by the last few summers that were electric, and it’s so nice, you can relax and not have the noise at the same time, while at an easy pace getting somewhere.
Sails you need to watch and manage and small combustion motors are noisy.
Ferries typically have a ballast capacity that can range from
around 20% to over 40% of its deadweight tonnage (DWT). Sand, Concrete, or Lithium, the only difference is density.
The reason you don’t see electric boats everywhere is mostly endurance, that huge expensive battery sounds like mind boggling energy storage but when it comes to pushing lots of water out of your way for many weeks on the longer shipping journeys you need much more energy than that. And even if you could pack enough energy into batteries onboard for those longer journey most boat will do the ports don’t want your boat stuck there for a few days, maybe even a week or two recharging to go away (your battery might be able to recharge faster, but is there the dockside infrastructure to recharge it that quickly?).
It’s 250 tons of batteries in a 14,000 ton ship. Less than two percent of the ship weight. How much ballast do you need?
Interestingly, a typical electric road vehicle allocates ten times that weight fraction (20-25%) to its battery, which drives another 20-25% in structural mass, making electric road vehicles 50% heavier for a given load capacity than those using more dense energy storage methods.
Not really. Its a consideration as obviously the more you weigh the larger your hull needs to be and the heavier you are the more energy it takes to move you but its not a major consideration. Its absolutely something that has to be considered when adding equipment to already existing hulls but when you’re designing from the ground up you can build your hull with the required displacement.
Where that weight is – you want it down low to maintain an ability to recover from steep rolls.
This sounds like it’s pure electric, compared to other vessels like Wightlink’s Victoria of Wight (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Victoria_of_Wight) which just seems to use the batteries to reduce in port emissions.
Wow. That’s going to be one huge salvage bill for some lucky entrepreneur.
“Currently, Uruguay has about 92% of its power from renewable sources. Argentina still uses mostly natural gas, but 42% of its electricity is sourced from renewable generation.”
I mean… Argentina is 15 times larger than Uruguay and not all of Argentina is next to one of the largest rivers in the world
Uruguay also produced 7000 GWh of hydro while Argentina produced 30000 GWh
silly comparison lol
No racks seems like a problem, although batteries aren’t rice so they don’t slosh. I’ve built electric boats but for single digits number of people so I’m a bit out of my element here :)
water and lithium batteries….what could possibly go wrong??
I hope nothing, but I wouldn’t be comfortable on this.
You know boats have electric lights and things right?
The water stays outside the boat otherwise you have a bad day.
Those electric light are powered by diesel generators and sealed lead-acid or dry-cell batteries.
When the water gets into the hull – and it will – its going to be a mess.
The first battery car ferry has now operated for ten years. And succes ferries are now Commodore in trist country is now many
The first battery car ferry has now operated for ten years. And such ferries are now common in this country. https://www.norled.no/en/nyhet/the-electric-ferry-mf-ampere-has-now-crossed-the-equator-6-times/
240,000 km in ten years! An average speed of more than 1.5 knots. Good show!
Yeesh. NORLED needs better headline writers.
It’s a local ferry. It stops for a while, , drives three sea miles, stops again and returns. It’s never was going to make that many miles. Still, there are lots of those around and replacing them with electric ones when the time comes will be beneficial.
PWM fan ventilation of the cells and controllers in salt air? Ask any repair guy about what the inside of a laptop looks like after just a few months on a ship. The ongoing maintenance of this may turn out to be quite a circus.
https://www.pcpitstop.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/corrossion-1.jpg
I’d assume that the battery room only needs fans for air circulation so it can shed the head from the middle of its mass of battery to the walls of the room which may well be below the waterline and thus radiate into the water or at least the rest of the ship.
Assuming that is true being a closed room not meant to exchange warm internal air with the inevitably salty but cool air there shouldn’t be much if any corrosion.
“A full charge is expected to take just 40 minutes. ”
So, charging at a rate of 67 MW. Enough to power a small city. That’s a pretty decent power line by itself.
Some (many?) electric ferries use dock-side batteries to buffer the huge intermittent load on the grid: Charge the dock up at (say) 1 MW continuously, and dump 10 MW into the boat for the 10 minutes it’s changing over the passenger load.
It means you’re paying the battery charge/conversion tax twice, and means double the capital cost of batteries, which surely must impact the economics of the game.
The reality is the ‘economics’ of this is not ‘making profit’ but ‘getting government grants’.
No doubt depends a great deal on where its operating – places with lots of renewables in the mix already you might well be actively making profits trading back and forth with the grid on that shore battery (if it exists) on top of being able to rapidly charge your small fleet of ferry.
And if you happen to be a nation with relatively cheap electricity for any reason and likely worse cost wise strict emissions regulations running on electric might well be cheaper than fitting and maintaining suitable exhaust scrubber and using a cleaner but more expensive fuel than the heavy marine sludge.
Also worth pointing out that the battery charge tax is usually pretty darn small as most battery have very good efficiencies, so 2x of it isn’t actually all that bad in energy consumption terms (though price for that energy in your local market is obviously a somewhat different criteria). However as shipping in tankers of fuel oil, or building a handy refinery right by the docks and shipping/piping in crude etc to refill the ship with fossil fuel is hardly efficient either and can easily end up with many ‘wasted’ moves between first extraction and eventually getting into that specific fuel tank – I’d suggest for most locations the amount of energy consumed to bring the fuel to the ship or move the ship to the supply is vastly more than the electric transmission and battery taxes, so cost wise aught to be more. But given all the subsidies and long established infrastructure that effectively isn’t counted as part of the cost any more, as it has long paid for itself it quite probably won’t be – you naturally consider the cost of building that new shore battery buffer as its new infrastructure, and not cheap, but the ship fuelling infrastructure even if its still expensive to run and maintain tends to be forgotten as its just how things have always been.
Weird question – won’t you have an environmental disaster on your hands if this sinks? Because despite it being 2025, piracy and ship destruction by state actors is still VERY real.
As you would with a ship fill of oil and gasoline. I also doubt a ferry offers good risk/reward for pirates, regardless of propulsion.
An aluminum hulled boat filled with lithium batteries.
Good luck with escaping that fire.
Wow… It feels like there is already an unsolved problem with huge battery banks catching fire in static installations. When we pack them into an aluminum hull and introduce some salt water, what could go wrong?
Why risk it with lithium polymer batteries when there is plenty of LiFePo to go around that isn’t just chomping at the bit to rapidly turn into expanding hot gas.?
The batteries are basically ballast, and not even ALL the ballast. Who cares if they are ~20% less energy dense.
The 5x-10x more charge cycles wouldn’t be a bad thing either.
where do you have lithium polymer from?
5.016 Cells do not make 5016 batteries …
Yara Birkeland is an electric freight ship that has been traveling around for a bunch of years already. It’s got a 50MWh battery, 25% more then this ship. And there are quite a lot of other electric ships around too. I believe the Chinese are experimenting with ships with TEU sized batteries, so they can be quickly exchanged and charged while the ship itself is traveling.
The video attached tot this article is really atrocious though. I skimped through it, but I I only heard a silly tune and “impressive” (not) pictures. There are much more interesting documentaries about electric ships, but it’s still a bit experimental.
Another (wild?) idea:
There are sea cables (both data and power), and there are ships that roll out those cables. I wonder if it would be feasible to have a ship rolling out an “extension cord” during it travels, and reeling it in on the way back. This is certainly not viable for all ships, but there are plenty of ships that have (mostly) fixed routes. I am not aware of such a system in operation though.
I can’t see a corded ship being practical, because the cable insulation would fray and cause electrical shorts.
Perhaps a better approach would be to have charging stations on oil rig like platforms permanently wired to the electrical grid. it would be slower but the tech is similar to how electric cars make multi hop journeys.