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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 15 2020, @06:20AM (2 children)
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)
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
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.