[HN Gopher] Bizarre 460-foot "battery tanker" set to ship electr...
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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]
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