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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 09 2018, @11:09PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 09 2018, @11:09PM (#746692)

    And this is different from a boat-load of diesel or bunker fuel exactly how? Think, man! Think!

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 10 2018, @02:07AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 10 2018, @02:07AM (#746766)

    Quite different:

    + Lithium metal reacts spontaneously with water (and even water vapor in the air) and makes a fire that can't be extinguished (at least in some cases). So the batteries have to be *extremely* well sealed, maybe they are soldered into big sardine cans with glass pass-through connections like a vacuum tube?

    + Diesel fuel on the other hand is pretty hard to ignite, takes ~20 atmospheres (compression ratio) in a Diesel engine to ignite on contact with air, and for that to work the fuel has to be very finely atomized.

  • (Score: 2) by dwilson on Wednesday October 10 2018, @02:37AM

    by dwilson (2599) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday October 10 2018, @02:37AM (#746778) Journal

    Sodium will react with water to produce hydrogen gas and a FUCKTON of heat, resulting in an explosion. Lithium is directly above Sodium on the periodic table, which means it should react in roughly the same way in the same situation. I expect he's making a joke about the reactability of lithium with water, the explosion that results, and the fact that boats are generally found in or around water when they have a collision with battery-puncturing potential.

    For the record, I support whole-heartedly the shift to a battery/electric paradigm, while acknowledging that internal combustion engines have their place and will never totally go away. The problem isn't ICE, the problem is several million ICE in a physical space the size of say, Los Angeles, or New York. If the major cities see a massive shift to all-electric, places like Iowa, Kansas or Butt-fuck-nowhere Canada aren't going to be hurting anything by burning diesel.

    --
    - D