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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?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by rondon on Tuesday October 09 2018, @03:55PM (2 children)
I like this personally as an idea, because diesel boat engine fumes make me sick to my stomach. I very rarely get sea-sick, but when I'm on a diesel fishing boat that is idling I get sick quickly from the fumes. I am stateside, btw, so maybe Amsterdam enforces better exhaust cleaning on their ships and boats, but I doubt it.
Long story short, diesel boats make way more pollution than seems acceptable to me, and now there seems to a viable (over the course of a decade, anyway) solution to the problem for some boats.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday October 09 2018, @04:08PM
I agree - particularly if we can feed the batteries from nuclear power plants, oh, wait...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 09 2018, @05:38PM
The smell is due to the fuel that is being used, if you were to run a Diesel engine on waste vegetable oil it would smell like a chip shop.