DHL Set to Transport Goods on New Wind-Powered Cargo Ships

https://www.wsj.com/pro/sustainable-business/dhl-set-to-transport-goods-on-new-wind-powered-cargo-ships-eca5d5a0

134 59 1 month ago

For anyone interested in economics and life cycle math (for sailing in general, not the trimarans they are using here) I recommend https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2021/05/how-to-design-a-sa...

mattas2• 1 month ago

"415 metric tons of goods. That means they have about five times more cargo space than an airplane, but are five times smaller in length than a typical container ship."

Not to take anything away from this (it's great), but for reference, an average vessel in Maersk's fleet can carry about 100,000 metric tons so you'd need about 250 of these to replace a single container ship.

Not sure why the article decided to compare cargo capacity of a airplane with the length of a container ship, but alas.

bluGill2• 1 month ago

This might be useful for a tiny island. Ship from a large Caribbean island to a small one for example. The distance means the round trip is day (night?) trip, and there a things you want shipped in every day, but airplanes are expensive. I'm sure there are other niches where there is only a small amount of cargo going from point A to point B as well. However in general the world needs more cargo and so this doesn't make sense for most.

SirFatty• 1 month ago

Maybe they might not be restricted to Long Beach or Port Newark.

mattas2• 1 month ago

I actually think there's an argument to be made for this to be an alternative to typical cargo ship operations.

The challenge when moving goods via ocean vessel is that everything takes _a long_ time. Loading and unloading the vessel can take days. Transit is weeks. Unloading the vessel takes days.

You have 2 options now: air freight which is crazy expensive but gets it there in a few days max or ocean freight which is relatively cheap but might take weeks. If you can cut out vessel loading/unloading you save at least a week.

ZeroGravitas2• 1 month ago

Island hopping is a niche where electric flight might get started.

Hawaii is looking at running some next year.

https://www.sfgate.com/hawaii/article/hawaii-electric-airpla...

__sy__• 1 month ago

This was my exact intuition. At 450 metric ton, we're three orders of magnitude away from what large container ships can do. It's a nice PoC but this is clearly just PR from DHL.

Air freight is also an odd comparison since it's usually time-sensitive and/or pricey ($100+ per pound).

wongarsu• 1 month ago

It's DHL. If you want your package or pallet shipped to some island it might take a long while until a big container ship makes the next stop there. If it can stop there at all. For a package/freight company, the capability to run ships on your schedule to small harbors is valuable. And a catamaran could be a competitive alternative to other smaller container ships

What I don't understand is that they are talking about running it trans-Atlantic. Taking longer than a normal container ship, while taking less cargo. You save on fuel, but surely the crew costs must be eating up all those savings. And you're not really faster. Unless the plan is to go point-to-point between smaller harbors, making up any lost time by saving on cargo handling time

Arnt• 1 month ago

Smallish container ships are used a lot. Look at traffic from the big ports like Rotterdam to small ports like Orkanger or Kristiansand.

A lot of containers take a small-ship trip after the big-ship one.

pier252• 1 month ago

The important metric should be emissions per metric ton though, including construction of the ships.

ffsm8• 1 month ago

Urm, it's pretty well documented that historically the biggest deciding factor in shipping is cost. The size of the vessel and the travel speed are unimportant vs cost of the journey. So if they can essentially remove fuel cost, they're able to reduce the shipping cost and hence outcompete bigger vessels on the only metric that had historically mattered in that industry

rayiner• 1 month ago

Not sure why the article decided to compare cargo capacity of a airplane with the length of a container ship, but alas.

Because journalism is plagued by innumeracy. Same reason the author is talking about the length of cargo ships instead of the volume.

senectus1• 30 days ago

the way the american administration is pushing for de-globalization... this might be the perfect future market.

burkaman• 1 month ago

I love this idea, but do these ships exist yet? I can only find renderings, and the company's "roadmap" page is not a roadmap (https://vela-transport.com/feuille-de-route/).

The only real footage I can find is a construction video from a year ago: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DL9CSLdtkaP/

jeroenhd• 1 month ago

The ships aren't new, but a large transport operator like DHL buying into the concept is.

Well, unless you count pre-motor cargo ships of course, those were the only option for centuries.

niwtsol• 1 month ago

I dont know what I was expecting on the roadmap page after you said it was not a roadmap, but I did not expect to see a whale jumping over a human as part of the "roadmap"

ecshafer• 1 month ago

This is like the 1984 calendar ripping meme except the year is 1600.

strongpigeon• 1 month ago

At the risk of sounding overly negative, these things are pretty much always vanity projects. Someone wanted a really cool boat and managed to get some investors onboard. It’s more about an aesthetic than a business case.

We’re talking here about a fairly large crew that will transport a small amount of cargo while taking a really long time. On top of that, these aren’t container ship so loading/unloading will take a long time. There is no economic case here.

The only way you can make this somewhat work is by selling the aesthetic/story. E.g.: this coffee was shipped by sailboat. But even then, notice how every company linked in the article of another commenter aren’t actually operating anymore…

pseudohadamard• 30 days ago

Is it powered by a windmill from a miniature golf course going out of business? I know some guys who built one like that once, but it sank on its maiden voyage.

jeffbee2• 1 month ago

20 years ago I read this magazine article about putting kites on container ships for efficiency. This gadget seems to have durable appeal to entrepreneurs and/or suckers.

https://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2005/09/17/sa...

The company recently went bankrupt, by the way. It turns out that gigantic container ships are already incredibly efficient.

WorkerBee284742• 1 month ago

Another version of the idea is still around:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotor_ship

eesmith4• 1 month ago

I first learned about it in the 1980s, in an issue of Popular Science. Ahh, this 1984 issue of PopSci - https://archive.org/details/popular-science-1984-no.-1/mode/... .

Ohh, a year previous PopSci talked about using the Magnus effect for wind turbine blades. https://archive.org/details/popular-science-1983-no.-8/mode/...

In any case, it's another gadget which "seems to have durable appeal to entrepreneurs and/or suckers."

mmooss4• 1 month ago

This gadget seems to have durable appeal to entrepreneurs and/or suckers.

Or most research and technological development requires years or generations of experimentation and failure before success. And every time, the creators and innovators are told they are wasting their time, suckers, look how many failures came before you, ...

eesmith4• 1 month ago

Consider the steam powered airplane. It required decades of experimentation and failure before success, and that technical success was a dead-end.

meristohm• 1 month ago

Incredibly efficient, but if they're burning hydrocarbons to move, at scale they are incredibly damaging to earth's atmosphere, and to animals disrupted by engine and propeller noise.

International trade is wonderful, all this new tech we're drowning in is amazing, and- understand that every one of us will eventually die, hopefully passing on some positive influence to others along the way, and that it turns out opting for the new car, the big climate-controlled house, the weekly/monthly/annual/still-too-frequent long-distance flights/drives, the new pocket computer every few years, the fancy unnecessarily-powerful laptop, the hours spent on all the man-child hobbies because we haven't outgrown our childhood insecurities, all this is an incredible waste compared to the meaning derived from healthy relationships with people within walking distance, tending the land we get our food from.

jeffbee2• 1 month ago

Shipping uses so little energy that switching it to synthetic liquid fuels while we figure out something else is plausible. More plausible than reverting the fleet to 2000x more sailing vessels.

zdw• 1 month ago

Someone should make a sport out of this.

We already have sailing sports where people race all kinds of wind-powered vessels, and they push the envelope of tech development, just like F1 and the car industry.

Also rich people love this sort of thing. Give them something to do with all that money that has some sort of chance of improving things.

mockerell• 1 month ago

Look no further! SailGP is pretty much the maritime version of F1

colechristensen• 1 month ago

The startup building and operating the boats was founded by a famous yacht racer

CodeWriter232• 1 month ago

"The wind-powered boats could be especially appealing when oil prices have shot up because of the Iran war."

Check of oil prices same day article was published:

WTI $73.51/bbl BRENT $77.57/bbl MURBAN: $70.46/bbl

citrin_ru• 1 month ago

What we see in quotes is not the price of oil being shipped right now; it is usually a one-month futures contract. Traders expect that by this time, Hormuz will reopen. If it does not, they will lose money, but the actual price could be much higher.

CodeWriter232• 1 month ago

Close to the bottom price over the past 5 years is what it is.

lschueller• 1 month ago

In the big picture I am again and again fascinated by this. One of the oldest commercial services out there (post / shipping) proves repeatedly to be very innovative and strong in realization of new stuff like this. They were the first or one of the first, who deployed electrical cargo vans. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetscooter

To be accurate, they bought the startup. But still: they didn't wait for the automotive company to come up with a e cargo van.

calmbonsai2• 1 month ago

Let's see it last. It won't. This is just a short-term private endeavor/vanity-press project. Just because a business uses a "sustainable technology" does not make it a sustainable business. Comparing cargo ships to airplanes is apples vs. oranges and reveals the author's deliberate "headline" motivation and lack of technology understanding compared to the actual ground truth of shipping.

Until fuel prices change for the long-term and/or emissions regulations have an order of magnitude uptick as well as covering far more than sulfur (see IMO 2020 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MARPOL_73/78#IMO_2020 ), there will be zero economic incentive to use wind-power over diesel/bunker-fuel power.

And no, any advantages of docking at smaller ports are defeated by those ports having less land-transit access and we already have fleets of (smaller) cargo vessels serving these ports at insanely low $/ton/mile rates.

Just like farms, all of the economics point to larger vessels, larger ports, and operating entity consolidation. See "The Box" by Marc Levinson https://a.co/d/0gtBkWwt or watch a few "What's Going On With Shipping" https://www.youtube.com/@wgowshipping videos.

It will take some sort of global political or environmental catastrophic externality to even budge, let alone change, the status quo.

mmooss4• 1 month ago

That sounds so familiar. I swear I once read the same comment about renewable energy generation. :)

calmbonsai2• 30 days ago

They performance potential was always there for solar and wind energy. It was a known quantity that was an engineering inevitability.

The industrial scale-up just happened quickly since the same tech could be leveraged from chip manufacturing for solar and composite construction from airplanes for wind turbines.

There's no similar performance potential for wind-powered vessels over combustion-powered vessels that can be "scaled-up" and, if need be, we can make green fuel from raw materials and still economically out-perform wind vessels.

nickserv• 1 month ago

This will be great for their customer service, now they'll have a new excuse for losing your package.

arikrahman• 1 month ago

It's notable that setting sails will be a legitimate profitable venture. Too late to sail the seas, and too early to sail the seas.

ck2• 1 month ago

I remember seeing news about sails on cargo ship twenty years ago?

But whatever reduces the use of "bunker fuel" which is the most toxic vile fuel around (cruise ships use it too)

amirhirsch• 1 month ago

Cargo ships powered by the wind, we are living in the future!

phtrivier• 1 month ago

The boats are still being built, but Vela said it hopes to have five trimarans operating by 2030 to meet its once-a-week shipment goal.

Why is it always like this ?

"Slight improvement to be delivered in beta in a 5 years for limited users at premium prices.

Meanwhile, the latest catastrophe auto-updated 4 times while you were reading."

somat• 1 month ago

What if we put a large wind turbine on a ship? A sort of modern set of sails if you will.

A mid sized cargo ship has a 50_000Kw engine. A mid sized offshore wind turbine makes 1_000_000Kw. So depending on which way the wind is blowing it could work. Put a diesel electric drive and a full sized engine then use the wind turbine to see how much it could reduce fuel use. I was even having fun dreaming about the incidentals. how hard it would be to build a folding/quick assembly mechanism for the turbine to make harbor/bridge/crane access problems go away. could we duel purpose the wind turbine boom as a crane boom. Would a vertical turbine make sense?

While reading up on wind turbines I ran across the depressing story of the small ferry Hornblower Hybrid. A lot of hype on how environmentally friendly it was in 2008 when it was retrofitted with two vertical turbines. But my first though was "those turbines look awful small" and they are, the best they could do is power the lights not the boat itself. The boat itself was retro fitted in 2024 and lost it's electric drive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornblower_Hybrid

I bet even if it would work from an energy point of view, the extra complexity of the system would make it more expensive than a straight diesel ship from an operations and maintenance point of view.

marcosdumay• 1 month ago

There are several designs of kite propelled ships. Some commercially available.

A generator and a propeller would only add weight and complexity for a loss in efficiency.

There have also been ships with vertical turbines mechanically coupled to propellers. But you can't build them very tall, so you lose the best winds. Those haven't been good enough in the past.

pier252• 1 month ago

It's difficult to see how huge these are from the photo in the wsj article.

Check this photo:

https://vela-transport.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/FACE07...

ElijahLynn• 30 days ago

Oh wow, so they are only using sails?

The article seemed a bit light on actually how it's been powered.

My initial assumption was that it's just going to harvest wind out of the air to power electric turbines since there's probably so much wind at the sea so much of the time.

But there's a quote in the article that says we're going with the wind, and not in a straight line.

ZeroGravitas2• 30 days ago

An interesting comparison would be a standard cargo ship that goes as slow as possible.

"Slow steaming" is already in use and has some dramatic impacts on fuel use.

The limit seems to be "hotel loads" i.e. constant loads needed for crew, but the sailboat will have those as well and not spread over as much cargo.

It's entirely possible that a sail boat that follows the wind might be higher carbon per cargo kg than a giant standard ship going very slowly directly to the port.

DHL Set to Transport Goods on New Wind-Powered Cargo Ships

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