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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: 2) by takyon on Wednesday October 10 2018, @08:10AM (1 child)
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).
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 10 2018, @10:18AM
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.