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.
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.
Hawaii is looking at running some next year.
https://www.sfgate.com/hawaii/article/hawaii-electric-airpla...
Air freight is also an odd comparison since it's usually time-sensitive and/or pricey ($100+ per pound).
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
A lot of containers take a small-ship trip after the big-ship one.
The only real footage I can find is a construction video from a year ago: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DL9CSLdtkaP/
Well, unless you count pre-motor cargo ships of course, those were the only option for centuries.
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…
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.
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.
Check of oil prices same day article was published:
WTI $73.51/bbl BRENT $77.57/bbl MURBAN: $70.46/bbl
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.
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.
flowingfocus•1h ago