Winged cargo ship saves three tonnes of fuel per day on first voyage
An age of greener, more efficient shipping may be in the offing as a specially modified 43,000-tonne bulk freighter completes a six-month sea trial using a combination of diesel engines and a set of high-tech automatic sails to catch the wind.
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I get the whole "this isnt new" sentiment but we cant just swap right back to 100% wind power without developing NEW wind propulsion methods. We need to either match the speed of engine powered ships or increase efficiency (like this has).
Unless you want to go back to ships taking many more months or years to cross the ocean like they used to. Being snarky about ships using wind again is completely the wrong attitude to have if we want to make this work.
The long term solution is probably a combination of technologies - hydrogen and solar to power some propellers cleanly, batteries to regulate the solar and wind power, new and improved "sails" like this, channeling energy from waves, new types of coating that significantly reduce friction and increase gliding factor, new much lighter containers to reduce total weight, etc...
Probably just need to use biofuels and or very large battery systems. Generating enough energy on a vessel of that size probably isn't feasible. Could maybe switch to nuclear instead that seems risky
Giving all these ships access to nuclear generators would be really bad.
Biofuel tanks might work in some situations, but it would either take away from shipping volume or limit access due to height of the ship.
Why would it take away from shipping volume? A biodiesel or equivalent shouldn't take up any more room then current field?
Bio fuels are typically less energy dense than dinosaur squeezings. Diesel is around 40 mega joules per liter. Biodiesel is around 33.
So in this example you only get 82.5% of the energy unless you increase capacity of the fuel tanks, which would decrease the available space for cargo.
