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by mattas4 hours ago |
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upvoteby bluGill4 hours ago|
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This might be useful for a tiny island. Ship from a large Caribbean island to a small one for example. The distance means the round trip is day (night?) trip, and there a things you want shipped in every day, but airplanes are expensive. I'm sure there are other niches where there is only a small amount of cargo going from point A to point B as well. However in general the world needs more cargo and so this doesn't make sense for most.
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upvoteby ZeroGravitas3 hours ago|
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Island hopping is a niche where electric flight might get started.

Hawaii is looking at running some next year.

https://www.sfgate.com/hawaii/article/hawaii-electric-airpla...

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upvoteby scottlamb1 hours ago|
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As I understand it, Hawaii had environmental concerns with ferries (requiring a review that was never completed), specifically whale/ship strikes and the risk of car-carrying ferries transporting invasive species between the islands. [1] I'm unsure if other islands would have similar concerns about cargo ships or not or if the environmental review would have been satisfactory if they'd just done it on time.

I'd expect ferries and/or small cargo ships to be an attractive option if allowed.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaii_Superferry

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upvoteby newsclues3 hours ago|
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They do it on Vancouver Island in B.C.
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upvoteby WorkerBee284742 hours ago|
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It doesn't appear to be in normal operation, but it has been tested:

https://harbourair.com/going-electric

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upvoteby mattas4 hours ago|
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I actually think there's an argument to be made for this to be an alternative to typical cargo ship operations.

The challenge when moving goods via ocean vessel is that everything takes _a long_ time. Loading and unloading the vessel can take days. Transit is weeks. Unloading the vessel takes days.

You have 2 options now: air freight which is crazy expensive but gets it there in a few days max or ocean freight which is relatively cheap but might take weeks. If you can cut out vessel loading/unloading you save at least a week.

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upvoteby amdsn3 hours ago|
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I find it hard to believe that you wouldn't lose any time you gain in loading/unloading to transit time inconsistency when you have to rely on wind. This is not even to mention the fact that these ships cannot make good use of big modern ports with cranes and the best logistical connections and that it would take 100+ of them with hundreds of crew to move as much as a single container ship can with 20 people. I could see them being useful in niche scenarios like cabotage within island/archipelago nations or shipping small loads on irregular schedules, but for anything else it is very hard to beat a container ship.
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upvoteby devonkim2 hours ago|
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This is HN, we can use an analogy of TCP window size or UDP packet size in an underlying high latency medium and the receiver and sender have very high processing costs. So perhaps solving the unloading and loading logistics is also worth optimizing for like we did almost for free in computing space? But because we don't have ballpark numbers of each terribly well we're going to have some difficulties with a valid non abstract system design discussion.
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upvoteby SirFatty4 hours ago|
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Maybe they might not be restricted to Long Beach or Port Newark.
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upvoteby bluGill3 hours ago|
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Those ports have the rest of the infrastructure though and so it makes other logistics worse
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upvoteby __sy__4 hours ago|
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This was my exact intuition. At 450 metric ton, we're three orders of magnitude away from what large container ships can do. It's a nice PoC but this is clearly just PR from DHL.

Air freight is also an odd comparison since it's usually time-sensitive and/or pricey ($100+ per pound).

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upvoteby wongarsu3 hours ago|
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It's DHL. If you want your package or pallet shipped to some island it might take a long while until a big container ship makes the next stop there. If it can stop there at all. For a package/freight company, the capability to run ships on your schedule to small harbors is valuable. And a catamaran could be a competitive alternative to other smaller container ships

What I don't understand is that they are talking about running it trans-Atlantic. Taking longer than a normal container ship, while taking less cargo. You save on fuel, but surely the crew costs must be eating up all those savings. And you're not really faster. Unless the plan is to go point-to-point between smaller harbors, making up any lost time by saving on cargo handling time

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upvoteby throwaway1737381 hours ago|
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You might not need much crew for a vessel that small. Automation can take care of most of it, and with the right equipment the ship can basically sail itself. Then you just need a captain and maybe some maintenance crew to keep the automation running.
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upvoteby b40d-48b2-979e2 hours ago|
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Your crew isn't emitting hundreds of tons of CO2 burning the dirtiest fuel available on earth, though.
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upvoteby Arnt3 hours ago|
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Smallish container ships are used a lot. Look at traffic from the big ports like Rotterdam to small ports like Orkanger or Kristiansand.

A lot of containers take a small-ship trip after the big-ship one.

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upvoteby pier252 hours ago|
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The important metric should be emissions per metric ton though, including construction of the ships.
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upvoteby ffsm82 hours ago|
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Urm, it's pretty well documented that historically the biggest deciding factor in shipping is cost. The size of the vessel and the travel speed are unimportant vs cost of the journey. So if they can essentially remove fuel cost, they're able to reduce the shipping cost and hence outcompete bigger vessels on the only metric that had historically mattered in that industry
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upvoteby cbmuser2 hours ago|
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[flagged]
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