A full disruption of the heavy marine space will apparently await lower cost, lighter batteries that take up less space and are produced in vastly greater volumes. But the time to begin to substantially disrupt the space is now. A couple factors now present make this possible. One is auto bidder and the apparent need to flatten the duck curve (aside from enforcing that no petrol energy should be allowed to be sold until all green is sold period- petrol is he excess never green!!!!- this holds even if contracts must be vacated) and the other as with trucking is it is not necessary to access customary range to disrupt a majority of shipping with green power. There are a few other drivers that will be important. For owners of say a super heavy cargo ship like the Benjamin Franklin (biggest now with even bigger Chinamax standard ships to follow,) fuel is their greatest cost and their greatest uncertainty- 2 years of fuel at present rates will equal the cost of the ship under full utilization. Green could drive their fuel costs to almost zero very quickly- especially if they could accept shorter routes as would be the case with green and/or could be less selective in where they refueled- already the case with BF because not many ports are deep enough accommodate it. And another driver is how dirty these vessels are. It was said in the early 2000s that 15 heavy cargo ships emitted the cancer and asthma causing equivalent of 750 million cars. There have been slight improvements in this regard but not much as the fuel they burn in international waters (away from population visibility) has 50x more contaminants than Semi diesel- it is minimally processed crude fuel oil and substantially more energy dense than gasoline- this contamination will mean these freight lines will be facing increasing pressure from governments. Making their vessels smokeless is about as far as they can take their diesel based tech and that happened (but not with the BF) already. The fundamental issue here seems to be that fuel oil has a power density about 51x current batteries and these shipping economies of scale come from raw bulk and also the cost of batteries and volume and weight have to be balanced against the must higher cost of fuel- but where batteries add multiples of cost to the price of the ship even with a retrofit- presume cost goes from 155 million current to something like 750 million. Rail can move a ton of weight something like 500 miles on a gallon of gas, but for the cost of a gallon of gas in CA the Benjamin Franklin can move a full US average 2 ton vehicle more than 1000 miles- its 4x more efficient than rail- but divide that by 50x due to 50x more pollution so it is like 50mpg in pollution terms but not CO2 terms. The BF can move the weight of 120,000 of such US vehicles roughly 38,000 miles over couple of months on a single refueling. The Benjamin Franklin's engine seems to be about 43% efficient verses new green as in Northrup Grumman commercial electric HTS 98.6%- it would take two HTS's to replace the engine in the BF but would yield a modest power increased for reduced weight and space and radically increased efficiency and reduced maintenance. The BF has a crew of 27. If every available surface of the BF were clad in current solar PV it might be possible to get another 8% of the BF's energy needs. So just changing some elements of the ship might yield a 2.5x efficiency gain. The cost of green energy if arbitraged out of the duck curve by auto bidder or provided under contract at say 8 Minute rates of 1.1 cents a kwh might in conjunction with onboard solar and electric drive drop the price of fuel to 1/36 or almost equal the labor costs. But trade of would be a 5x more expensive ship and a 3/4 reduction range between re-charging. The current ship if used nonstop would refuel 12x in 2 years and go around the earth under full load 1.6x per refueling. Also refitting for battery might cost 10% of space/tonnage. It would mean it could do a round trip between LA and Hong Kong but not much more before a recharge. It might take a couple of hours to recharge not bad against refuel rates- invisible underneath loading and unloading rates. Also charging even at the substantially reduced green power plant rate augmented with onboard solar and fractioned down to a quarter range might take 10 day's worth of output from a 7100 acre solar farm in NV (because such farms seem to produce an order of magnitude less than they should)- could see how this could help with the duck curve. To 1/36 the cost of fuel you'd multiply the cost of the by 5x (to 750 million) so the ship would take maybe a little over 10 years to pay off. It would require something like 500 million in batteries which would be better spent for now on semis because that would be 5662 or so Semi's worth and the semis would consume about 3x as much fuel per year even if the kind of fuel wasn't as toxic- and the return for a company like Tesla would better earlier on with semis to help fuel the green transition. Also it would seem to make sense to put a power pack in every TEU shipping container and cover it in light weight solar and insist that the power pack be fully charged prior to being loaded onto he ship and Autobidder could then credit the power to be used- might be able to lower the cost of the ship by $250 million that way and make better use of batteries/solar as containers just sitting around would often recharge the internal power pack even as they are often submerged in a stack. Also a solar clad BF would never be dead the water it could run along at 3 knots if it had to The fuel tank in the BF has the same volume as a cube 82 feet on a side. Its interesting that ail seems to be opened up right now. We just hit he necessary power density with batteries. And the Chinese just produced a true electric jet that doesn't even require a turbine- it super heats air with a pressure vessel- plasma, microwaves and sound for huge thrust and efficiency also another inventor came up with new body that uses mechanical friction over the wings to use the upper atmosphere as a batter and further there is a new shape that looks to added something like 30% efficiency while making planes safer and more comfortable and able to carry more- add all this together and air travel is ripe for disruption right now it seems.
