China’s Nuclear-Powered Containership: A Fluke Or The Future Of Shipping?::Since China State Shipbuilding Corporation (CSSC) unveiled its KUN-24AP containership at the Marintec China Expo in Shanghai in early December of 2023, the internet has been abuzz about it. Not jus…
https://trendydigests.com/2023/12/20/wind-powered-cargo-ship-sets-sail-on-historic-voyage-2/
Keep in mind that “primary” power source isn’t going to happen. You’re not moving modern cargo loads on wind power alone. But it can provide supplementary power, reducing fuel usage.
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My understanding is that like most things you start running into issues with a) how mass scales (so at a certain point you start adding more mass of sails to push the mass of sails you added to push the mass of…) and b) structural integrity (ie, you can’t just make a sky scraper taller by doubling all the dimensions; at some point steel just isn’t strong enough).
There’s also the issue of speed; no matter how many sails you add, the wind only goes so fast, and it doesn’t go reliably. Modern shipping has deadlines and no one is going to settle for “We got becalmed” or “We lost two months because we were tacking into headwinds the whole time”.
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I completely agree. Our approach of simply reducing emissions from our current societal and economic structures will not scale sufficiently. The problem, as always, is capitalism. We build things further away because it’s cheaper. We run international shipping on ultra tight schedules and develop systems like just-in-time logistics chains because hyper-efficiency (at the cost of intense fragility) makes more money.
These structures have to be broken, or at least heavily disincentivized, in order to make real headway in combating climate change.