China launches world’s largest electric container ship with 50 MWh battery

I agree however there is only 1 but and that’s the fact that the labor costs are much lower in China than in the West. Still a great job by China.

Oi lad, shut up and eat yer coal!

We're putting in tones of wind power. The problem is the weird linking of electricity prices to gas prices and the fact we don't have anywhere near the energy storage capacity we need. So we end up paying wind farm operators to shut down turbines and generate less when its extra windy.

Still doesn't really seem all that big. Some EVs have 100 KWh batteries. A container ship with the battery capacity of 500 cars doesn't sound like much.

Using standard container sizes as battery modules is kind of genius. That way they can be swapped out when they get older and newer technology comes along, they could even be swapped between ships.

I expect they are using LFP which doesn't do that.

Fortunately energy density is not a concern with boats.

These batteries are likely far more complex in packaging, design, and thermal management that any consumer electronic cell. They'll likely "fail safely" if/when they do fail.

Good news, it’s surrounded by water! Bad news, it’s surrounded by water. 😡

Probably because trains are limited in both weight and volume compared to ships and also less efficient. If you have this short route and know it'll need this amount of cargo shipped it likely makes sense.

This single ship can carry more containers than any train could be expected to pull, likely by at least one order of magnitude.

All in all I'd guess the advantages are roughly:

• Reduced staff
• reduced energy use (land based shipping is less efficient almost by default)
• no need for infrastructure except ports (if you assume there is no train line or this shipping would move existing lines over capacity building this ship is likely cheaper or at least in line with 300km of rail)
• simpler logistics (loading / unloading)

Disadvantages:

• Speed (a train would likely move at 3-5x the speed)

I would also not expect the risk for catastrophic fires to be all that high. This ship has the batteries be containers. So once you've designed a container that is a large battery, you've already spent so much that a proper BMS including proper battery fire suppression as well as proper breakers/contractors are things you've built into it without even thinking about cost. The separation provided by building containers as the battery is the next line of defence if one container fails spectacularly, it also allows the batteries to be maintained on land, much cheaper than if they were part of the ship.

if only we had some kind of wind powered boat technology.

If only we could get energy to trains easily and continuously.

Why make trains when we have horses