You underestimate the force of wetted surface area resistance. The sail area needed to move a modern cargo ship at the snail’s pace of old sailing ships would be unmanageably large. You simply couldn’t hold enough sail area to get them near their current speeds. These hybrid sail concepts are nice, but all they do is save some fuel.
So, I got that information from a different Lemmy comment, and on the spur of your contradiction I went looking myself. My search results are flooded with mostly useless news articles (they went to tell stories, not relay technical information). Regardless, the most ambitious claim I’ve seen is to reduce emissions by up to 90% for a ship design that can’t handle shipping containers and is about 1/4 the size of the largest ships being produced today.
Don’t get me wrong, I want this to happen. In fact, I would ban carbon-fuel shipping today, if I could make it happen. That being said, I don’t think we’ll ever get back to 100% wind power.
The sail kite project has had claims of up to 10% fuel savings for about 20 years, now.
It’s all moot when we should just be focusing on figuring out practical nuclear shipping. It’s the only way to meet or exceed our current standard and be carbon-free. The NS Savannah proved it could be profitable ages ago, and that without any economy of scale to reduce costs.
Hmm i feel like there it was a case of working against the ocean whereas here I think it is working with the wind so it shouldn’t be THAT bad… but who knows…
You underestimate the power of wind, stranger.
You underestimate the force of wetted surface area resistance. The sail area needed to move a modern cargo ship at the snail’s pace of old sailing ships would be unmanageably large. You simply couldn’t hold enough sail area to get them near their current speeds. These hybrid sail concepts are nice, but all they do is save some fuel.
So, I got that information from a different Lemmy comment, and on the spur of your contradiction I went looking myself. My search results are flooded with mostly useless news articles (they went to tell stories, not relay technical information). Regardless, the most ambitious claim I’ve seen is to reduce emissions by up to 90% for a ship design that can’t handle shipping containers and is about 1/4 the size of the largest ships being produced today.
Don’t get me wrong, I want this to happen. In fact, I would ban carbon-fuel shipping today, if I could make it happen. That being said, I don’t think we’ll ever get back to 100% wind power.
The sail kite project has had claims of up to 10% fuel savings for about 20 years, now.
It’s all moot when we should just be focusing on figuring out practical nuclear shipping. It’s the only way to meet or exceed our current standard and be carbon-free. The NS Savannah proved it could be profitable ages ago, and that without any economy of scale to reduce costs.
They found out rhe hard way with the Ever Given
Hmm i feel like there it was a case of working against the ocean whereas here I think it is working with the wind so it shouldn’t be THAT bad… but who knows…
It was more a comment on the power of wind on a modern container ship.