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0 pointssuperice2y ago0 comments

It does make sense. The problem is scale. There is an inland barge in the Netherlands that does this with 4 20ft battery filled containers, capacity is about 200TEU if I remember correctly.

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.

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slashdev2y ago

If you use fast chargers you can not only charge them quickly, but you could prefer charging them when electricity is cheaper than normal (when the wind is blowing out the sun is shining.)

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.

algo_trader2y ago

> The problem is scale.

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

supericeOP2y ago

Does not matter if you can’t move that much power to container terminals. You presumably don’t want to put a nuclear plant in every port. Even if you consider the battery problem to be solved at scale, you just don’t quite appreciate the enormous energy consumption of these ships. Charging them with existing infra used for refrigerated container is a fiction, plain and simple. You’re off by 2 or 3 orders of magnitude.

_hypx2y ago

This is one area where we’re guaranteed to see a fuel being used. Either synfuels, e-fuels, ammonia, hydrogen, etc., it will have to be something that can be carried into the port from elsewhere. There’s no other way around this problem.

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slashdev2y ago

If nuclear were cheap enough to do that, we’d just put the reactor on the ship.

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.

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0 pointssuperice2y ago0 comments

It does make sense. The problem is scale. There is an inland barge in the Netherlands that does this with 4 20ft battery filled containers, capacity is about 200TEU if I remember correctly.

0 comments

slashdev2y ago

If you use fast chargers you can not only charge them quickly, but you could prefer charging them when electricity is cheaper than normal (when the wind is blowing out the sun is shining.)

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.

algo_trader2y ago

> The problem is scale.

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

supericeOP2y ago

_hypx2y ago

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slashdev2y ago

If nuclear were cheap enough to do that, we’d just put the reactor on the ship.

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse