
All-electric passenger ferry to be built in New Zealand - prostoalex
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12177865&fbclid=IwAR1aD3aeBU8Q7TX-ojfRl9qqJKQ2Q1bw7Eod3Jbu7QJ5wVVX8F38baYGUIA
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jakewins
Visiting family this Christmas, I was happy to see the ferry line that
connects Sweden and Denmark has retrofitted their fleet, so they are now all-
electric.

The ferries are automatically recharged by a robotic system at each port while
they are loaded, it's pretty neat.

[http://sailwiththecurrent.com/](http://sailwiththecurrent.com/)

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Someone
For those wondering: the first was
[http://fjellstrand.no/flyers/flyer_1696.pdf](http://fjellstrand.no/flyers/flyer_1696.pdf)
(2015)

Quite a bit larger than the NZ one (4 times the length) , about a MW of power
(max), and, reading [https://electrek.co/2018/02/03/all-electric-ferry-cuts-
emiss...](https://electrek.co/2018/02/03/all-electric-ferry-cuts-emission-
cost/), about a MWh of battery capacity.

This isn’t built for long distances, but a good first step.

~~~
Gibbon1
This is also interesting, Sweden is converting it's two large ferry's to
battery electric as well.

[https://electrek.co/2017/08/24/all-electric-ferries-
abb/](https://electrek.co/2017/08/24/all-electric-ferries-abb/)

These aren't small ships, 10,000 tons.

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boznz
Small steps :-)

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thinkloop
"Southern Hemisphere" is an irrelevant non-interesting click-baity qualifier
here.

"Johnson just set the world-record fastest pitch ever! against an eastern
conference team on an odd calendar day during an avocado price crisis"

~~~
smcl
Well perhaps to you, but if you're an aspiring engineer in New Zealand or
Australia it can be quite good and inspirational to be reminded that modern
tech isn't just something that happens on the other side of the world.

~~~
disordinary
Not just something that happens on the other side of the world but even just
retaining knowledge. In Wellington we replaced out NZ built electric trains
with ones made in Korea, and our NZ made electric busses with ones made in
China. So it's good to see this sort of manufacturing knowledge return to the
city

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xte
Few note in today's "electric fever":

\- since few (not so few) years all mid-size/large boat thrusters are
electric, normally powered by combustible oil generators, they have replaced
expensive diesel engines used in the past;

\- we know very well how simple and effective an electric engine is,
unfortunately we also know how hard is storing electricity.

Long story short IMO all these "battery-based electrical vehicles", ferry,
plane etc included are simple _stupid_ engineering games or marketing moves
until we found an affordable way to store electricity enough.

Also people should take into account that we use petrol not only as an energy
source but also for plastic, witch include nearly anything from electrical
insulation to packaging solution and we do not have real/more environmental
friendly alternatives for most of these uses. That's of course does not means
that we have to keep going with petrol, but means that we need far more
research before doing real move.

In the meantime people should consider in terms of pollution how many
emissions they can produce building modern, small, insulated homes (reducing
both steel usage that it's a real problem today since we are really start to
fall short and HVAC/heating power consumption), consider that we can use
alcohol and methane for car and small vehicle power in general, they produce
both far less pollutants than petrol/diesel fuel.

~~~
woodandsteel
>Long story short IMO all these "battery-based electrical vehicles", ferry,
plane etc included are simple stupid engineering games or marketing moves
until we found an affordable way to store electricity enough

Correct, but you failed (intentionally?) to note that now we have. More
specifically, every year the proportion of the totality of vehicles becomes a
logical target for elctrification grows larger. Would you really dispute that?

>consider that we can use alcohol and methane for car and small vehicle power
in general, they produce both far less pollutants than petrol/diesel fuel.

The day has passed when that would be better option than electrification.

>In the meantime people should consider in terms of pollution how many
emissions they can produce building modern, small, insulated homes (reducing
both steel usage that it's a real problem today since we are really start to
fall short and HVAC/heating power consumption)

Why can't we do both?

~~~
xte
I do not failed to notice the _commercial_ and _political_ push toward
battery-based EVs, I do not notice that they can be sustained in the mean and
long run.

We can't produce and dispose enough battery to electrify our personal vehicle
only at country-scale, we can't produce and distribute enough energy to charge
them.

Consider that at a certain scale we can do tons of things, but only at a
certain, limited, scale. In Germany hydraulic-propellers for trains are still
fairly common, they are super-duper complex to design and maintain but they
was pushed as a flag of excellent German industry decades ago and they have
them even if are monsters and does not really scale nor offer any practical
advantage. In the '60s Italian Ansaldo have designed and build electric planes
with electricity generator inside the fuselage, they fly well but they can
move around half the load of the correspondent classic-design plane and they
cost more, another Italian industry, Fiat, have built personal cars with a
jet-mini-turbine engine as a power generator + electric motors, they works
however they are so noisy, they eject too much heat, they consume so much fuel
that they simply drop it.

The fact that we can do something it does not means automatically that it's a
good things to do nor that can scale. We can save enormous resources and
improve our lives building energy-efficient houses so it's a good move, we
can't for now produce electric vehicles so we have to research (a forgotten
thing in managerial-era) but not try to push something we know can't scale.

