Norway switching to battery-powered ferries
Not far from Norway’s North Sea oil rigs, shipbuilders are assembling some of the first ferry boats ever to be powered entirely by batteries.
For years, the yard, nestled against the deep-blue sea waters and snow-clad mountains of the country’s deepest fjord, mostly made fuel-guzzling boats for the oil industry. But orders vanished as crude slumped in recent years. Now, like other Norwegian industries, its future prosperity depends on going green.
“If you look at the next five years, this is what we’ll be doing,” said Erlend Hatleberg, a project manager at Havyard Group, which runs the Sognefjord shipyard that’s switched to specializing in boats with battery technology similar to plug-in cars. “We were in a really deep is back.”
While progress in electrifying the world’s excessively polluting shipping fleets is miles behind advances in automobiles, Europe is making initial strides as Paris Climate Accord goals to cut carbon dioxide emissions loom large. Dozens of battery-powered boats that can move through inland waterways in Norway, Belgium and the Netherlands are about to make their first voyages, including some able to run fully automatically without a crew.
Nowhere is this push more prevalent than Norway, a country where almost all electricity produced is hydropower, the state oil company is expanding into offshore wind farming and people drive more electric cars per capita than any country in the world.
Next up, Norway wants twothirds of all boats carrying both passengers and cars along its jagged and windy Atlantic coastline trough. But activity to be electrified by 2030. Havyard is filling 13 orders for zero-emission ferries received since 2016.
Zooming out, though, the progress may be a drop in the bucket. To really slash maritime pollution would require the 50,000 tankers, freighters and carriers traversing the oceans to switch to renewable energy. The largest use diesel engines as big as a four-story building house, with emissions comparable to 64,000 passenger cars.
Without big changes, the International Council on Clean Transportation warns sea transport could be responsible for 17 percent of CO2 emissions by 2050, up from 2-3 percent now. But shipping was omitted from the Paris deal and battery technologies haven’t evolved enough for long ocean voyages, according to the International Maritime Organization, which is set to reveal an initial set of guidelines next month for cutting greenhouse gases.
“Battery technology is simply not competitive and still requires significant further evolution in terms of performance and cost reduction before it could be preferable to synthetic fuel options,” Lloyd’s Register Group, a maritime classification society, said in a December report.
The first zero-emissions ferry, called the MF Ampere, started sailing between the villages of Oppedal and Lavik along the Sognefjord in 2015.