China Launches First 700 TEU Electric Containership for Yangtze Service

https://maritime-executive.com/article/china-launches-first-700-teu-electric-containership-for-yangtze-service

by jes • 3 years ago

42 21 3 years ago

Hot-swappable containerized batteries! This is exciting, and it could be the start of a trend and a standard!

xeromal2• 3 years ago

Super interesting. I recall a company in Thailand doing that for scooters. They had a wall exchange where you just drop in your old battery and get a new one. Real plug and play. This is obviously way more intricate though.

ryzvonusef• 3 years ago

There is a company in Taiwan called Gogoro, which created this market; they sell scooters that you can't charge, but they have modular batteries and battery swap stations all over the island.

You just stop at any station, insert your depleted batteries, click a button on the app and they give you freshly charged batteries to put back in and go.

gogoro youtube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5ddtHj_N2E

asianometry video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZigLuaijsI

slashdev5• 3 years ago

That makes a lot of sense when you think about it. Container ships are always stopping to load and unload containers in ports. Both the ship and the port already have infrastructure for handling containers. They also have infrastructure for handling refrigerated containers which need electrical hookups. This likely needs more specialized electrical hookups for charging and discharging, but that’s an incremental change rather than a whole new thing.

superice3• 3 years ago

It does make sense. The problem is scale. There is an inland barge in the Netherlands that does this with 4 20ft battery filled containers, capacity is about 200TEU if I remember correctly.

The problem is charging. Charging up 4 containers worth of batteries takes a wild amount of power, we’re talking multiple orders of magnitude more than refrigerated units. By my calculations you needed about 100 days of charging on a single reefer plug. Ofcourse you can speed that up with custom charging infra, but still, the amount of total energy needed is mindbogglingly large and won’t scale easily to ships of 20 000 TEU, or even just constant visits of these 700TEU feeder ships.

mytailorisrich• 3 years ago

This also exists for EV cars:

https://www.scmp.com/video/scmp-originals/3168635/chinese-sm...

abracadaniel• 3 years ago

For anyone else wondering, TEU is effectively the number of cargo containers it can carry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-foot_equivalent_unit

SeanAnderson• 3 years ago

It's kinda wild that container height isn't standardized when discussing TEUs

superice3• 3 years ago

It’s pretty much irrelevant. You can stack containers vertically easily, and height difference doesn’t matter that much (8’6 vs 9’6 are the two common sizes). Below deck you have a hard cap because of hatch covers, but above deck you’re only really capped by sight lines. Lengths are 20ft and 40ft, so differ much more, and so having TEU or FEU as measurement is much more useful.

schainks• 3 years ago

“Battery in a shipping container” systems today can supply somewhere between 1-4 Megawatt hours of energy. If the ship has two 900kW motors, then you get about 30 minutes to two hours of propulsion per container at ahead flank and under ideal conditions.

I suspect these ships stop fairly frequently, maybe once every few hours or once a day? I read once that containers can be loaded/unloaded at a rate of about one per minute, so “refueling”, so to speak, becomes a 5 minute to one hour job, depending how much energy is needed. I wonder how competitive that is with current ships of similar size.

The economics become better as energy density of the containers improves, for sure, though.

newusertoday• 3 years ago

Tell me, Mr. Anderson. What good is a containership, if you’re unable… to get water?

China Launches First 700 TEU Electric Containership for Yangtze Service

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