alt Hacker NewsIs it possible for ocean vessel to generate from sun panels as much as needed for moving? I would suggest vessels does not need scarce Lithium, it is too needed for some other uses.
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Lithium is not scarce, and not a limiting factor for scaling up batteries.
There's more than enough lithium out there, more discovered every month, and the perception that we are limited by lithium is mostly out there because certain media sources are trying to help out there fossil fuel friends by delaying the energy interchange by a few years.
Whether battery ocean shipping containers make technical sense is a different question, but I wouldn't worry about lithium use!
Yes, but it would move very slowly compared to current freight ships, think an order of magnitude lower average speed. (You can compromise on the freight features to get some more speed of course, but it's still going to be slower unless you do something dramatic like fly a huge PV array as a kite or something)
Besides PV, there's a long history of wind powered ships of course.
No.
I’m too lazy to do it myself but 5 minutes of searching and calculating will show you that the area of solar panels required to move a ship is far, far, larger than the area of that ship.
Not to mention that a container ship’s deck is typically completely covered with, well, containers.
Also, lithium isn’t scarce.
There are examples of solar electric catamarans - but they are much smaller than a cargo vessel. It's not nothing, but we're some ways away.
I wouldn't underestimate what creative and dedicated engineers can accomplish.
No, but with wind it's possible. Either vertical windmills or sails with modern signal processing.
Honestly DJI and Boeing should get into this business. A boat's sail basically a plane's wing, aerodynamically speaking. They share a lot of similarities with endurance gliders.
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Unfortunately, it's not even close. Maybe 1-2% in a highly optimistic scenario.
- 20k square meters of hull space
- If fully covered with solar panels, on a sunny day, you could expect 1-2 MWh (when averaging in night time)
- Current diesel engines typically output 60MWh continuously while underway.
And that's not factoring in the solar panels getting covered in salt over time and losing efficiency. Plus preventing the ship from actually loading / unloading cargo efficiently.
It's not just a matter of panel efficiency either. If we had magic panels that could absorb 100% of the suns power over the 20k sqm deck, it would only equate to about four times as much (8% of the overall power need).