Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Wednesday January 15 2020, @02:19AM   Printer-friendly
from the how-long-is-the-extension-cord? dept.

BBCTech:

Powered entirely by batteries, Ellen is something of a Tesla among ferries. Fully charged, the 60m vessel can sail 22 nautical miles with up to 200 passengers and 30 cars onboard.

[...] Totalling 4.3MWh this is the largest battery capacity at sea and equivalent to the average amount of electricity a UK household consumes each year.

[...] After a 70 minute voyage, Ellen arrives at the harbour in Søby and moors alongside the charging station.

A mechanical arm plugs in and recharges the batteries in less than 25 minutes with clean energy supplied by local wind turbines.

[...] "We are paying maybe 25% of what you would pay for running a similar diesel vessel." says Ms Heinemann. "So that's the significant saving."

Electric propulsion is beginning to spread from passenger cars to trucks and now ferries.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 15 2020, @06:20AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 15 2020, @06:20AM (#943486)

    An overhead wire would work fine. If it runs DC with the right polarity, it even suppresses corrosion.

    Another way is to reel out a cable along the bottom.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 15 2020, @09:21AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 15 2020, @09:21AM (#943520)

    The other ships in those lanes would likely not appreciate smacking into overhead wires. I don't know the depths involved, but the route is on the order of 17km/10mi or so; not a simple river crossing. To support cable over a span like that would need lots of towers, again in a likely shipping lane (as a point of comparison, it looked like the longest/highest spans in the world were on the order of a couple km). Several miles of cable would also be quite a lot to spool on board, pay out, and retrieve - and last any length of time. No experience in these areas, but strikes me as terribly impractical - reasonable to do on land, but the sea is a different beast.

    • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 15 2020, @02:08PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 15 2020, @02:08PM (#943577)

      A more practical (and greener) solution would be to take advantage of wind power by placing a sail on the boat and using the batteries onboard as a power assist to blow a fan into the sail.