[HN Gopher] Bizarre 460-foot "battery tanker" set to ship electr... ___________________________________________________________________ Bizarre 460-foot "battery tanker" set to ship electrons by 2026 Author : wjSgoWPm5bWAhXB Score : 26 points Date : 2023-06-01 10:33 UTC (2 days ago) (HTM) web link (newatlas.com) (TXT) w3m dump (newatlas.com) | [deleted] | pcurve wrote: | Target range of 110 miles by 2030. Then 220 miles by 2040. | | I'm not familiar with global sea route, but I'd imagine use cases | for <100 mile route by small cargo ship is limited? | | Unless the energy density multiplies quickly, it feels more like | a vaporware. | adhesive_wombat wrote: | Whether or not this is a sound engineering decision, it also | sounds a bit like a hack in Factorio that makes sense due to a | quirk in game mechanics. | linkjuice4all wrote: | There's the cargo ship mod and chargeable batteries and | accumulators that you can ship - maybe that's how they | validated the idea in the first place... | supportengineer wrote: | If there was ever a case for sails/kites, this is it | djmips wrote: | I guess every ship is shipping electrons right? I don't think you | can call storing chemical potential energy 'electrons'. | | This is an interesting concept - I guess if electric cars make | sense then this also makes sense for transporting energy? | NickM wrote: | I think most people just don't realize that when you charge a | battery you're not literally just filling it up with electrons. | adhesive_wombat wrote: | Tangentially, the book _The Vital Question_ is fascinating: it | explains how life on earth is basically just proton-moving | machines with flair (and how such machines could have come to | evolve in the first place). | anamexis wrote: | Electric cars don't transport energy, they transport people. | ALittleLight wrote: | They do both. Imagine driving to pick up someone who charges | their phone in your car. | jsnell wrote: | > I guess if electric cars make sense then this also makes | sense for transporting energy? | | I don't see how that follows. The point of a electric car isn't | to transport the electricity, it's to transport matter. There's | no shortcut here: the only realistic way (short of Star Trek | transporter beams) we can get the cargo from point A to point B | is by physically moving it. | | In contrast, we already have other ways to transport energy | which work quite well. It's hard to see how this absurd concept | could possibly be competitive with them. | Null-Set wrote: | You can put matter on grid powered trains instead of battery | powered self propelled vehicles. | jacquesm wrote: | I'd absolutely love to do DD on this project. It has all kinds of | interesting bits to research. On the assumption that they have | done their homework there must be something non-obvious that they | know that outsiders don't. | CPLX wrote: | I mean it's a press release. Those don't cost anything. | | The only application of this that seems half feasible is maybe | some kind of post-disaster recovery where for whatever reason | you've ruled out using a generator. | jacquesm wrote: | Even then you'd probably be better off shipping a mixed load | of diesel trucks and large generators. | | Even the larger version doesn't make a whole lot of sense, | you'd be looking at keeping the ship in port for quite a | while unless those batteries are going to be charging and | discharging at very high rates but that would shorten their | life (and hence the number of trips). They are aiming to do | 'short runs' only (100 km is mentioned in the article but the | economic range is a bit larger) which makes it even more | dicey economically. | | Their transportation costs per KWh as quoted in the article | exceed current generation costs by a factor of three already. | 214 MWh is a proverbial drop in the bucket on grid scale and | even 10x isn't all that much, and you can only deliver power | if you have enough of those vessels to guarantee overlap at | the destination or you're going to have to deal with outages. | | I wonder who is investing in this project. | mabbo wrote: | What exactly happens if even one of those batteries pops? | thriftwy wrote: | Never overestimate the power throughput of a barge loaded with | charged batteries. | londons_explore wrote: | 241 megawatt hours isn't very much... | | A medium sized power station is say 300 megawatts. | | So if you want to transport this power just a few tens of miles, | you probably need a fleet of 10+ ships constantly charging and | discharging. | | I am very dubious that that works out cheaper than just laying a | cable, even through deep water. | Mizoguchi wrote: | It's in the article: | | "Why not just put down an underwater cable? That's a fine | question. PowerX points out that Japan is surrounded by deep | seas, and prone to earthquakes, and says in a press release | that "the ship-based solution resolves issues such as long | downtime from undersea cable malfunctions and repairs, as well | as the high costs associated with ultra-high voltage | connections and substations." | adhesive_wombat wrote: | Coming from the owners of a battery factory, also sounds a | bit like a Sim City news ticker message: "Pineapple-based | economy a no-brainer: President of the World Pineapple Trade | Federation". | | Then again, they could well be right on a one-ship basis and | maybe that's all they need, and this needs less capital | expenses like, say, a hydrogen handling terminal at each end. | jacquesm wrote: | That doesn't make a ship a viable alternative by itself. And | there are plenty of undersea cables within Japan, including | power cables. | | The solution would seem to be to generate power _in Japan_ | not to transport it there by such bizarre (I agree with the | title here) method. But let 's reserve judgment and see how | it plays out in practice, I'm going to watch this one just to | see how real life matches my intuition about this project. | [deleted] ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-06-03 23:00 UTC)