First, this is a really well-written post. Many thanks.
In my opinion (hope?), EV/Hybrid/Alt Energy is pretty far along for cars, not so far for trucks. Near zero for boats except for highly adapted use cases such as the Duffy or sail. But I also see there are a number of very interesting efforts on the horizon such as the Steeler. Will it be a Nikola, or something more promises? Or are the barriers you cite impenetrable and thus we are destined to always have ICE boats?
Where JWellington has gone awry is he sees EV/Hybrid boats much further along the adoption curve than anyone else (or that can be reasonably supported - even the Steeler distributor has been radio-silent).
But it begs an interesting question - how do boats like the Steeler fit onto the technology continuum, especially for reduced-carbon energy? TT - your posts indicate you believe they are Emperors Cloths, just a fancy marketing veneer. Is that an over-simplification? For long distance, I suppose you're right - for years, owners of Hybrid cars have been disappointed by their lack of amazing mileage on long trips.
So what do these boats mean to the future? Any impact on carbon-reduction? Hybrid/EV in sail is definitely gaining traction - what is the Powerboat equivilent?
Peter
I said very little about boats in my last post, so let me address that. Again looking at this from the perspective of fuel reduction and emissions reduction, there is little to no opportunity to apply any of these technologies to make the run-time of a diesel more efficient. What they can potentially do is open up the opportunity to propel boats using stored shore power (assuming it's renewable, or at least more efficient cradle to grave that direct drive diesel), and onboard solar in place of running a diesel. Onboard wind might have some opportunity, but I suspect a sail boat already does the best job of converting wind into boat propulsion.
The challenge is that it takes a lot of energy to move a boat, and that means a LOT of energy storage so you can take some shore power with you, or a LOT of solar to power the boat directly. And even with solar you will still need storage for times when solar is limited. But for small boats making short trips, with plenty of time to recharge between trips, it can work well. The classic Duffy is a great example. People have also mentioned European or other canal boats and that sounds pretty promising too. The key is to have a use model where you can have a light boat, run slow, and keep the distances short such that the energy need is a match for battery capacity. Where it breaks down is when the boat is bigger or heavier, needs to go faster, or needs to go a longer distance than a battery bank can support. There also needs to be an underway-to-dockside duty cycle that allows time to recharge with whatever dockside facilities are available. So a gigantic battery may be able to get you more range, but it also means more time to recharge.
And this all presumes that taking shore power, converting it, charging a battery, drawing it out of a battery and converting it again, then turning an electric motor is indeed less polluting etc than running a conventional drive diesel. The plant-to-plug impact of shore power can be difficult, if not impossible to really assess. It's easy to say "it's more efficient", but is it really? The power comes from a wide range of sources. Do you even know where it came from? Have you ever seen it really picked apart and looked at carefully? I haven't.
Solar can assist with a boat like above, but it's pretty clear that there isn't physical space on a boat to provide for it's full power needs. Yes, there have been a couple of experimental concept boats, but Cornell's experience reveals the reality for "normal" cruising. In another thread we looked at whether the solar that you can fit on a boat is enough to overcome the losses in a serial hybrid system, but they were not. Solar will help extend battery range in a parallel hybrid, but it's not enough to run a "normal" sail boat, and falls way short of running a power boat.
So how can things improve? Well, solar could become a lot more efficient, but I'm not holding my breath. Over the past 30 years efficiency has gone from the low teens % to about 20%. That's a lot of small incremental improvements as is typical with any technology, but it's absent any big changes. Really the big improvement in solar is that it has gone from about $5/watt 20 years ago to $1/watt today. To meet the needs of a power boat I would guess solar would need to approach 100% efficiency, and of course that won't happen. And for a sail boat a doubling to 40% efficiency might do the trick. But I'm not aware of anything that promises to do that.
For batteries, I too don't see massive change on the horizon anywhere. I say this because Lithium Ion batteries have been on the scene and in commercial use for around 30 years now. The point is that they didn't suddenly emerge out of nowhere. Things like this start off small and expensive, fill needs where the economics work, and if they are solid technologies that actually fulfill their promise, they grow and expand with incremental improvements and ongoing cost reductions, just as solar has. Lithium Ion didn't suddenly appear. It became cheap enough that it started to be practical to apply them in cars. That drove further cost-focused development, lower prices, and now it's viable in ways that it never was 20 years ago when it could only be justified in a laptop or cell phone.
Because of all this, I don't see radical change in how all this might get used in boats. I think we WILL see more and more small day boats moving to electric, just as we are seeing more and more locally driven cars moving to electric. Maybe even some trawler applications will emerge. I do think there are a lot of people who do short runs each day, moving from marina to marina. That might work. I also think that for every successful attempt at applying alternative power to boats, there will be 10-100 failed attempts, mostly because it was seat-of-the-pants rather than engineered. And accordingly, for every alternatively powered boat that is purchased and meets a customers expectations, 10-100 will fall short. But as long as there are buyers, there will be builders and sellers delivering what people "believe" must be a good idea.
For longer range trawlers, I don't see any application for propulsion. Great fro house power, but way short for propulsion. No amount of solar can make any real contribution, and you can't fit enough batteries to match a typical fuel load, not to mention the time to recharge. In yet another thread on this subject I ran some numbers and a trawler that runs a full day underway under normal speed conditions, then docks, would take days to recharge. That might work for some, but I expect it will be a minority.
The only technology that I think has the promise to fundamentally change our world energy problem, and the environmental side effects, is fusion. I've believed that since about 8th grade when I first learned about it vs fission. But obviously it's moved slowly. Maybe, hopefully, some of the recent developments will get things rolling with more focus. In the mean time we need to do everything we can to help in any and all ways. But let's do the things that help, not things that make the problem worse.
): 'that makes perfect sense, why wasn't it done earlier ?'
