Solar Maximum

Nope, not even close to feasible. Again run the numbers for how many batteries you would need to power a cargo ship for a passage. You would have to swap batteries out every few days on an ocean route. The idea of slinging thousands of tons from ship to ship while at sea in a storm is just rediculious.

1-50lb lead battery holds 1.4kwh of power (.7kwh usable)
88,000 kWh/hr - power used by a large cargo ship
2,112,000 kWh/day - power used by a large cargo ship
3,017,143 batteries required PER DAY of operation
150,857,143 - pounds of batteries PER DAY of operation
75,429 - TONNS of batteries used PER DAY

Emma Maersk which was the base line carries about 150,000 tons of cargo at max load. So one of the largest cargo ships in the world can carry enough batteries to power herself for two days. At her average speed of 24kn, that gives her a range under battery power of 576nm.

So we just need to design and deploy million of tons of batteries at refueling stations spaced every couple of hundred miles across the worlds oceans. All of which are capable of producing hundreds of mega watts of power a day. Then figure out a way to swap out hundred million pound battery banks while at sea, and be able to do all of this while in the middle of a hurricane, since ships so limited by range must be able to rely on their fueling stations.


It doesn't work, it can't work, and there probably aren't enough batteries made world wide to make this work just for EM, let alone the entire shipping industry.

I don't think you guys understand the scale of the power used by large ships, or even small boats to be honest. Large container ships use as much power as an medium sized city for propulsion and must have that power available at all times (like a city). Estimates vary, but roughly EM uses as much power as a city of 75,000 people over the course of a year.