DHL Set to Transport Goods on New Wind-Powered Cargo Ships (opens in new tab)

"415 metric tons of goods. That means they have about five times more cargo space than an airplane, but are five times smaller in length than a typical container ship."

Not to take anything away from this (it's great), but for reference, an average vessel in Maersk's fleet can carry about 100,000 metric tons so you'd need about 250 of these to replace a single container ship.

Not sure why the article decided to compare cargo capacity of a airplane with the length of a container ship, but alas.

Let's see it last. It won't. This is just a short-term private endeavor/vanity-press project. Just because a business uses a "sustainable technology" does not make it a sustainable business. Comparing cargo ships to airplanes is apples vs. oranges and reveals the author's deliberate "headline" motivation and lack of technology understanding compared to the actual ground truth of shipping.

Until fuel prices change for the long-term and/or emissions regulations have an order of magnitude uptick as well as covering far more than sulfur (see IMO 2020 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MARPOL_73/78#IMO_2020 ), there will be zero economic incentive to use wind-power over diesel/bunker-fuel power.

And no, any advantages of docking at smaller ports are defeated by those ports having less land-transit access and we already have fleets of (smaller) cargo vessels serving these ports at insanely low $/ton/mile rates.

Just like farms, all of the economics point to larger vessels, larger ports, and operating entity consolidation. See "The Box" by Marc Levinson https://a.co/d/0gtBkWwt or watch a few "What's Going On With Shipping" https://www.youtube.com/@wgowshipping videos.

It will take some sort of global political or environmental catastrophic externality to even budge, let alone change, the status quo.

At the risk of sounding overly negative, these things are pretty much always vanity projects. Someone wanted a really cool boat and managed to get some investors onboard. It’s more about an aesthetic than a business case.

We’re talking here about a fairly large crew that will transport a small amount of cargo while taking a really long time. On top of that, these aren’t container ship so loading/unloading will take a long time. There is no economic case here.

The only way you can make this somewhat work is by selling the aesthetic/story. E.g.: this coffee was shipped by sailboat. But even then, notice how every company linked in the article of another commenter aren’t actually operating anymore…

What if we put a large wind turbine on a ship? A sort of modern set of sails if you will.

A mid sized cargo ship has a 50_000Kw engine. A mid sized offshore wind turbine makes 1_000_000Kw. So depending on which way the wind is blowing it could work. Put a diesel electric drive and a full sized engine then use the wind turbine to see how much it could reduce fuel use. I was even having fun dreaming about the incidentals. how hard it would be to build a folding/quick assembly mechanism for the turbine to make harbor/bridge/crane access problems go away. could we duel purpose the wind turbine boom as a crane boom. Would a vertical turbine make sense?

While reading up on wind turbines I ran across the depressing story of the small ferry Hornblower Hybrid. A lot of hype on how environmentally friendly it was in 2008 when it was retrofitted with two vertical turbines. But my first though was "those turbines look awful small" and they are, the best they could do is power the lights not the boat itself. The boat itself was retro fitted in 2024 and lost it's electric drive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornblower_Hybrid

I bet even if it would work from an energy point of view, the extra complexity of the system would make it more expensive than a straight diesel ship from an operations and maintenance point of view.

In the big picture I am again and again fascinated by this. One of the oldest commercial services out there (post / shipping) proves repeatedly to be very innovative and strong in realization of new stuff like this. They were the first or one of the first, who deployed electrical cargo vans. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetscooter

To be accurate, they bought the startup. But still: they didn't wait for the automotive company to come up with a e cargo van.

Someone should make a sport out of this.

We already have sailing sports where people race all kinds of wind-powered vessels, and they push the envelope of tech development, just like F1 and the car industry.

Also rich people love this sort of thing. Give them something to do with all that money that has some sort of chance of improving things.

For anyone interested in economics and life cycle math (for sailing in general, not the trimarans they are using here) I recommend https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2021/05/how-to-design-a-sa...

> The boats are still being built, but Vela said it hopes to have five trimarans operating by 2030 to meet its once-a-week shipment goal.

Why is it always like this ?

"Slight improvement to be delivered in beta in a 5 years for limited users at premium prices.

Meanwhile, the latest catastrophe auto-updated 4 times while you were reading."

I love this idea, but do these ships exist yet? I can only find renderings, and the company's "roadmap" page is not a roadmap (https://vela-transport.com/feuille-de-route/).

The only real footage I can find is a construction video from a year ago: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DL9CSLdtkaP/

> "The wind-powered boats could be especially appealing when oil prices have shot up because of the Iran war."

Check of oil prices same day article was published:

WTI $73.51/bbl BRENT $77.57/bbl MURBAN: $70.46/bbl

It's notable that setting sails will be a legitimate profitable venture. Too late to sail the seas, and too early to sail the seas.

This will be great for their customer service, now they'll have a new excuse for losing your package.

This is like the 1984 calendar ripping meme except the year is 1600.

Cargo ships powered by the wind, we are living in the future!

I remember seeing news about sails on cargo ship twenty years ago?

But whatever reduces the use of "bunker fuel" which is the most toxic vile fuel around (cruise ships use it too)

20 years ago I read this magazine article about putting kites on container ships for efficiency. This gadget seems to have durable appeal to entrepreneurs and/or suckers.

https://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2005/09/17/sa...

The company recently went bankrupt, by the way. It turns out that gigantic container ships are already incredibly efficient.