Designs for battery tankers to transport renewable energy by 2026

I would think this can only ever be useful in places where a connection is needed only for a short time, e.g. to compensate the loss of a connection. Not only are battery tankers a huge investment, they also have an extremely short lifespan. According to the article, their batteries have a lifespan of 6000 cycles and a capacity of 241MWh. That means that during it&#x27;s lifetime, one ship can transport 1446000MWh of energy.<p>According to this study (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sciencedirect.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;article&#x2F;pii&#x2F;S2589004221014668" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sciencedirect.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;article&#x2F;pii&#x2F;S258900422...</a>), it costs 41.5$ to transport 1MWh 1000 miles across high voltage dc lines (including initial investment). That would be 10,000$ for a 1000mile trip for this ship. I believe there might be some edge cases where it is absolutely impossible to build cables or the link is only needed for very short timespans but other than that I don&#x27;t see this become profitable.

Other threads are discussing whether the specific numbers here pencil out, but to step back a second and take a high-level snapshot: the <i>trend</i> here is that batteries are becoming cheap enough to consider bulk transport of electricity.<p>Yes, there&#x27;s questions about weight and power density and all that, but slap your classic techno-exponential curve on all that and ask yourself what becomes interesting after 10 years of riding the experience curve?<p>There&#x27;s already companies looking at filling a shipping container with batteries and using them for temporary events like construction sites, concerts, or disaster relief. This ship idea takes it to the extreme: boats have the lowest dollar-per-weight-mile costs, so what use-cases become interesting when the limiting factor becomes techno-decreasing battery costs?

I see several shortcomings with this design:<p>- High investment cost to adopt the tech.<p>- High manufacturing and maintenance cost for this level of integration. (especially due to the battery short lifespan)<p>- Energy loss during power transfer, when unloading the electricity.<p>A more modular design could work better imo. Make it so the vessel can load&#x2F;unload standard power modules via rails&#x2F;warehouse-like robots. The standard power modules could be made from smaller, standard batteries such as Tesla powerpacks or future grid battery modules so that the cost of using this vessel on top of a renewable grid becomes marginal, and hot-swapping the fully charged modules with the empty ones ensures power is not transmitted twice.<p>Other benefits of standard modules is that production costs for battery modules will go down, and transmission could also happen on land over trains or trucks if the economic equation works out, or for extremely remote areas with limited local power generation capabilities.<p>In fact a whole ecosystem of hot-swappable residential modules could be bootstrapped, making it easy to deploy a single home installation or a microgrid in a remote area, all the way to a town, city, island or nation-wide grid.

The proposed capacity of 241 MWh is equivalent to a tank truck of gasoline, 26 m³.

I wonder if this is worth it. Such a ship is a large one-time investment - just like connecting landmasses with a cable is, which would be a lot more efficient long term I imagine.

I don&#x27;t understand ... there are already transmission cables for moving electricity around ... what is a use case that makes this worthwhile?

&quot;Forty percent of all shipping cargo consists of fossil fuels&quot;:<p>* <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;qz.com&#x2F;2113243&#x2F;forty-percent-of-all-shipping-cargo-consists-of-fossil-fuels" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;qz.com&#x2F;2113243&#x2F;forty-percent-of-all-shipping-cargo-c...</a><p>* <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29850631" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29850631</a><p>I&#x27;m not sure it is a good idea to expend energy to move energy.

This is a terrible idea when nuclear powered aircraft carriers and submarines exist.<p>Just...build a couple of those reactors into this thing, put it under military control for logistics purposes and get a much better system.<p>Edit: in fact basically you&#x27;d take the tanker form factor, build in a large desalination plant, hospital and kitchen and basically produce the disaster relief&#x2F;logistics supertanker hopefully at a lower price then an aircraft carrier.

It makes much more sense to just repurpose container ships - of which there is a glut I think.<p>What we should be transporting (ships, trains, trucks) is standard modular power units. Perhaps the glut of shipping containers could be repurposed to manufacture large standard modular power units.

This is not going to work.