this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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And how do you plan on electrifying such massive ships?
Electrifying cars is easy and electrified railways have existed for more than a century now, but good luck electrifying airplanes or cargo ships, they’re just too big and don’t run on tracks
Start with banning nonessentials such as cruise ships and get rid of private jets while we're at it, to start at least.
Gotta try first, got a whole world filled with specialists in various areas of expertise that could if they actually had the backing and funding of their governments and their voters to make a concerted effort in developing a solution. But that's not profitable, ergo under capitalism, not financially viable.
I think with ships a good starting point would be making them burn cleaner fuel. The heavy oil they're currently burning on ocean trips isn't exactly the cleanest fuel around, having ships burn the gasoline we save from electric cars would already do a lot.
Now this is a more reasonable take, first try finding a more sustainable fuel to use then think of a way to electrify it (if at all possible)
An electric car is easy, 2.5 billion electric cars not so much. One electric ocean faring vessel is difficult, but once you can 90,000 is easy. And like I said, 90,000 cargo vessel are using twice the fuel resources of those 2.5 billion cars. That's approx ~56,000 electric cars vs one electric cargo vessal
Just thinking out loud here, but if the main problem with building 2.5 billion EVs is making the batteries, why would that change anything if those 90,000 cargo ships each need 56,000 EV's worth of batteries? I'm sure there's some efficiency to be gained by making larger batteries, but it still doesn't quite add up.
Of course this also assuming a cargo ship is as efficient as a car in terms of replacing the ICE with an electric motor. I've heard the fuel these cargo ships use is some of the worst quality fuel that we have and it doesn't burn well, but it's very cheap in the insane quantities they need.
That's not how scaling works, big is easier, small is harder. Also we'd be replacing 56,000 cars worth of fuel storage on that cargo ship too. We can make non lithium batteries for mass storage, but they're the size of a house, couldn't get one in my car, but something tells me a cargo ship could carry it.