Thursday, February 28, 2019

Slow boat to anywhere

Via Instapundit, what it would take to replace diesel container ships with electric.
Technology we definitely don't have.
The conclusion is obvious. To have an electric ship whose batteries and motors weighed no more than the fuel (about 5,000 metric tons) and the diesel engine (about 2,000 metric tons) in today’s large container vessels, we would need batteries with an energy density more than 10 times as high as today’s best Li-ion units.
That’s a tall order indeed: In the past 70 years the energy density of the best commercial batteries hasn’t even quadrupled.

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