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posted by chromas on Tuesday October 09 2018, @01:44PM   Printer-friendly
from the row-row-row-your-boat dept.

BBC:

[The canal boat company] has converted six boats so far - it takes about three months to strip out the old diesel engine and install the electric engine and batteries. A typical 23m (75ft) tourist boat needs about 66 batteries, he says, making the conversion cost around 165,000 to 250,000 euros ($189,000 to $287,000; £145,000 to £220,000) per boat.

But the engines are quieter, cleaner and cheaper to run - boat companies should recoup their costs in about 12 years, according to the Paris Process on Mobility and Climate, a body supporting sustainable transport projects.

They can be recharged in about 10 hours and last about two days between charges, says Sigrid Hanekamp, an application engineer from Dutch battery company Lithium Werks, which supplied the batteries for Reederij Kooij's boats.

These batteries are not your typical lead-acid type traditionally used in cars, or even the type of lithium-ion ones becoming standard in electric vehicles, she explains. They're lithium-iron-phosphate, a chemistry Lithium Werks believes is more durable and environmentally friendly.

The boats have been converted to comply with Amsterdam's mandate that all canal boats be converted to electric by 2025, as a measure meant to preserve the environment and reduce noise.

Are measures like these heavy-handed, or necessary to move mankind past dependence on fossil fuels?


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by pe1rxq on Tuesday October 09 2018, @02:35PM (5 children)

    by pe1rxq (844) on Tuesday October 09 2018, @02:35PM (#746446) Homepage

    The 12 year recoup is for the whole conversion. So not only the batteries, but also a new engine and stripping it and modifying it to accommodate the new engine and batteries.
    So the recoup time for the batteries will be less than 12 years.

    As for lithium-iron-phosphate: they are supposed to last more than 10 years.
    And they should handle at least 2000 charge cycles. Charging once every two days (as mentioned in the article) ends up just short of 11 years.

    I don't know how accurate the numbers are, but it looks like they add up.

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  • (Score: 3, Touché) by Unixnut on Tuesday October 09 2018, @02:52PM (4 children)

    by Unixnut (5779) on Tuesday October 09 2018, @02:52PM (#746452)

    I seem to remember reading somewhere that the 85% of the cost of a battery electric drivetrain is in the batteries. Is that not the case? As such I would expect the cost of the batteries to be the main initial (and ongoing cost) of running such a machine.

    If it takes 12 years to break even on the investment, and the batteries will last round 11 years, it doesn't seem like a good idea. You work for 12 years to break even, and on the 11th year, you have to re-buy the battery pack, which could put your break even forward another 8 years or so. So now you have to work 19 years, and out of it you may only have 3 years worth of "profit years".

    Saying that, I have no idea what kind of profit/breakeven they were having before with the Diesel systems, so maybe it is better for them. As this is done by government mandate, either it will be better for them, or it will be worse, in which case some may go bust over the next 20 years.

    • (Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Tuesday October 09 2018, @03:02PM

      by shrewdsheep (5215) on Tuesday October 09 2018, @03:02PM (#746457)

      If the break-even cost is done correctly, it would include the battery replacement, i.e. the sustained operation on battery (incl. replacement) will amortize within 12 yrs.

    • (Score: 2) by rondon on Tuesday October 09 2018, @03:51PM

      by rondon (5167) on Tuesday October 09 2018, @03:51PM (#746471)

      That statistic (85% of cost) is probably for cars, which don't have the same types of costs as boats when you are talking about drive trains. This conversion was probably moderately expensive in terms of re-fitting the boats, because a diesel engine is really almost nothing like an electric motor paired to batteries and charge controllers, etc.

      Point being, the refit is most likely more than 15% of the cost estimate here.

    • (Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday October 10 2018, @08:10AM (1 child)

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday October 10 2018, @08:10AM (#746865) Journal

      Regardless of how the economics of this play out, I would hope that you could get at least a somewhat better battery at the end of those 10-12 years, seeing as there have been promises of double the energy density or more for new battery technologies, and there have been incremental improvements for Li-Ion.

      If we can't get double the energy density by 2028, that would really suck (I'm aware that different product categories use different battery technologies, e.g. Li-Ion smartphones vs. Sodium-Ion grid storage).

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      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 10 2018, @10:18AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 10 2018, @10:18AM (#746890)

        That "somewhat better battery" might require some updates, good chance it isn't going to operate at exactly the same voltage or require the same charger as the original. My guess, if the same chemistry is still available, the cost effective choice is to hope for lower price from higher volume production.