Cargill paid to have the Mitsubishi-owned ship retrofitted by Yara Marine with a couple of first-of-a-kind 123ft (37.5m) tall, rigid, complex sails designed by Bar Technologies, which is a spinoff company of an America's Cup team.
There are a lot of people trying to make wind energy a thing for cargo ships again. I’ve been looking at purported solutions on and off for at least a decade. Few of the them appear to make much sense in context of the shipping industry. Many appear to be motivated by romanticism rather than pragmatism.
So there are business model headwinds for wind energy on ships. But those aren’t the only challenges. Oh, and for container ships, where exactly do you have room to have something sticking up when the ship is a floating set of stacked rows 10 to 12 containers high? When the containers are a stack 100 feet or 30 meters tall, where exactly is there room for a sail?
Cargo ships are designed to be pushed from the back and to have the keel and the lee side of the ship push against the water sufficiently to overcome most wind loading from upwind. They burn fuel to go upwind. They point a bit more into the wind as necessary to achieve a straight course. Finally, at least for this piece, there’s the problem of crews. They cost money. Ships are optimized and automated to reduce the crews as much as is reasonable given various port and sailing duties. A typical bulk coal or iron ore carrier of 150,000 to 175,000 tons would have 20 to 30 crew members. Smaller ships might have eight to ten.
The solution has a couple of things which at least partially overcome the challenges listed above. They are mounted on one side of the ship and fold down parallel to the deck, getting out of the way of offloading and loading technologies. The sails are mounted nearer the front of the ship so more of the energy is towing the ship rather than pushing it sideways.
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