Dude awesome. I mean you gotta hand it to them. Killing it with affordable electric cars, solar panels and now this. It’s a step in the right direction, and that’s more than you could say about UK
To be fair, most of their technological advances come through intellectual property theft from companies from other countries that did the design and problem solving leg work and were dumb enough to exploit cheap Chinese labor. China could then easily copy their products. The workmanship and safety/quality of a Chinese product should be highly scrutinized.
I care little about that at this point to be honest with you ...
The alternative is that these innovating companies would have milked the IP and/or shelved it if it means more money, fuck the people, fuck the environment, etc etc etc
If China's IP theft brings the green revolution we knew we needed 50 years ago but the innovators sabotaged for profit, I'd consider China the robin Hood of the story
That’s not so true nowadays. Skilled factory workers already make a good salary in China nowadays. Like better than any other “global south” country at least. And by cost of living, better than the US probably tbh.
We're putting in tones of wind power. The problem is the weird linking of electricity prices to gas prices and the fact we don't have anywhere near the energy storage capacity we need. So we end up paying wind farm operators to shut down turbines and generate less when its extra windy.
Batteries and salt water mix poorly, so I’m concerned about that aspect for crew safety. I would actually be glad if they limited battery size, hoping to augment with solar, to reduce that hazzard.
Still doesn't really seem all that big. Some EVs have 100 KWh batteries. A container ship with the battery capacity of 500 cars doesn't sound like much.
Until you realize that the energy requirement is also different. Land transport in general is very inefficient. Ship is in fact one of the most energy efficient means of transport.
Yep, and the Chevy Silverado EV manages 200kWh now. This cargo ship better be small and efficient because 250 American pickup trucks worth of battery really isn't much.
Using standard container sizes as battery modules is kind of genius. That way they can be swapped out when they get older and newer technology comes along, they could even be swapped between ships.
These batteries are likely far more complex in packaging, design, and thermal management that any consumer electronic cell. They'll likely "fail safely" if/when they do fail.
Eh, it's a Chinese product - it may have good failure avoidance/protection, or it may just use a single resistor soldered where a microcontroller was clearly supposed to be.
Why not an electric train? There is contiguous land between the two cities, and then you don't have to carry your fuel with you or build giant batteries out of rare earth minerals, while risking run-away shorts that will surely endanger everyone on board, and ensure the cargo is lost.
Probably because trains are limited in both weight and volume compared to ships and also less efficient. If you have this short route and know it'll need this amount of cargo shipped it likely makes sense.
This single ship can carry more containers than any train could be expected to pull, likely by at least one order of magnitude.
All in all I'd guess the advantages are roughly:
Reduced staff
reduced energy use (land based shipping is less efficient almost by default)
no need for infrastructure except ports (if you assume there is no train line or this shipping would move existing lines over capacity building this ship is likely cheaper or at least in line with 300km of rail)
simpler logistics (loading / unloading)
Disadvantages:
Speed (a train would likely move at 3-5x the speed)
I would also not expect the risk for catastrophic fires to be all that high. This ship has the batteries be containers. So once you've designed a container that is a large battery, you've already spent so much that a proper BMS including proper battery fire suppression as well as proper breakers/contractors are things you've built into it without even thinking about cost. The separation provided by building containers as the battery is the next line of defence if one container fails spectacularly, it also allows the batteries to be maintained on land, much cheaper than if they were part of the ship.
I don't think you could sustain an electric ship with solar panels, but I wonder if you could appreciably extend the range of this ship by adding solar panels.
Hell, if panels get cheap enough you could slap panels on top of all the battery modules. If they happen to be covered by something else, so be it.
By that logic most of the world is helping Russia fuck Ukraine, because they’re also still trading with Russia. Even the US and Europe still are, despite the sanctions they’ve imposed on themselves.