Posted on 07/11/2025 6:21:23 PM PDT by verum ago
Washington’s first plug-in ferry will begin shuttling cars and passengers across Puget Sound by the end of next week.
Gov. Bob Ferguson made the announcement Thursday during a celebratory demonstration lap around Elliott Bay on the ferry Wenatchee, concluding a challenging conversion to hybrid-electric propulsion over the past 22 months.
*SNIP*
“Washington state is a great visionary state. It deserves a great visionary boat and it has got one today,” Inslee exulted.
*SNIP*
The complicated shore power infrastructure is in the design phase for the downtown Seattle, Bainbridge, Bremerton, Kingston and Clinton terminals. The Seattle terminal’s plug-in charging arm and power supply will probably be completed first, but not before 2029, according to a presentation to the state House Transportation Committee on Tuesday.
(Excerpt) Read more at kitsapsun.com ...
All new homes in Oregon are required to be pre-wired for solar panels. Wel;come to the Pacific Northwest.
Sounds dangerous unless it comes with regular tug.
Every one of our nuclear submarines has thousands and thousands of pounds of batteries. More than a World war two diesel electric boat would have. They also carry diesel engines to charge those batteries with. Every nuke boat is also a diesel electric boat by design. Why? The reactor must be cooled at all times with pumps or it will melt down from decay heat. If the reactor scrams and you cannot go critical again for damage reasons you also need propulsion to the surface and then you snorkel home in diesel limp mode.
Hybrid electric boats make sense for ferries and tug boats as well. The most efficient way to run a diesel is not rapidly ramping up and down the power curve it’s running it at 75% of full load flat rated. Ferries have to start ,stop and maneuver in rapid succession this causes them have diesels sized for the max instantaneous load point not the max continuous load point they are no where near the same. Tugs have an even more peak load vs avg load curve.
The hybrid solution allows you to skip the gear boxes as everything is electric like a diesel electric train, plus you sized the battery pack for peak load amp draws and size the engines for the avg continuous load with a 25% upper cushion from 75% to 100% loads.
Overall you will save fuel as the engines spend more time at the best BSFC point even considering the mass of the batteries which have dropped drastically in weight and price with modern LFP cells vs lead acid or silver zinc of the older marine rated cell types.
I’ve been on a small car ferry across the Potomac River once when the cable broke. It was pretty scary floating around. This sounds ridiculous.
They’re copying BC Ferries. They have four ‘Island class’ hybrid ferries, yet no place to plug them in! They are running on diesel until the infrastructure is built!
Does one have to stooped, or on dope, to live on the West Coast?
Interesting post. I just read about the Indy cars now having a very limited battery and motor to augment the engine. Brand new so the teams are trying to figure out if they want to use it a little bit throughout the race to conserve fuel (fewer pit stops) or to use it to provide a quick short burst for passing, etc.
I am dubious though of anything the Washington State DOT does. They always over-promise and under deliver and their timelines are always extended.
The contract for fully electric ferries was just awarded the other day. The local WA state company lost out to the low bidder from Florida.
They had better have 24 hour security for the cables. They will have to be so big that the druggies will steal them and sell them for pennies on the dollar. 🙄
The technical point was made later in the article.
[During the Wenatchee’s conversion to battery-powered propulsion, shipyard workers removed two locomotive-sized diesel engines. They kept two diesel-driven electric generators to supply backup power for when the batteries run low. The ultimate goal is to operate purely electric most of the time. But for the next few years, those diesel generators are the full-time source of power for all of the boat’s systems....
We anticipate saving 25% on the fuel just running in hybrid mode on this boat until we can start charging” from shore, Washington State Ferries chief Steve Nevey told reporters on board Thursday.]
25% fuel economy improvement is millions of dollars worth of diesel fuel per year they could skip the shore power and just run the ships and hybrids and laugh all the way to the bank.
Those smaller generators run more efficiently than the large EDM type diesels especially when ramping up or down or at idle. Those huge EDM locomotive sized engines also weight 20 tonnes each. A battery pack of that size in modern LFP cells would be 20,000 megawatts each double or triple the horsepower of the engines that replaced on a kilogram for kilogram basis.
There is a reason nearly every large ship is electric drive units on azipods or Z drives. All of our new Navy amphibious assault ships are.
Not a problem at all. It is a twin paddle wheeler. One paddle wheel propels the ferry and the other is connected to a generator to charge the batteries. To achieve this those brillient engineers up by the weed factory have designed a vessel with zero coefficient of drag, a paddle wheel of 100 percent efficiency and the other wheel connected to the generator is also 100% efficient and of course the generators are of equal efficiency as are the batteries and wiring. Those boys up there by the weed farm and factory are engineers of ability in the extreme!
Would I lie to you? I swear on my name (Joe Isuzu) it is all true, all of it! Now you know why I flunked physics and thermodynamics, and the concept of efficiency of energy transfer. Actually, I made an A. Entropy rules all.
On the east side,we have been promised a north/south freeway for near 50 yrs..but we get zilch...yet anything in seattle area gets built pronto.
This is the future of hybrids. 8kg worth of ultra caps and they can discharge or charge 400 kilowatts that’s 536HP. It only takes 600 watt hours worth of storage to hold the full kinetic energy of a car accelerating two or decelerating from 60 mph. It’s kilowatts that matter to hybrids how fast can you suck up regenerative braking energy the more the higher the mpg of the total system. It’s why the hybrid Camry gets 50+ mpg city and the ICE gets 30 same car ,same foot print one is vastly more efficient in energy flows and use.
https://allotrope.energy/page-pr-jun25.php
This confuses me. A hybrid is an internal combustion engine (in this case diesel) powering a generator to drive electric motors. How can this be more efficient than direct drive from the diesel engines to the propellers. There is a large loss of efficiency in the generation of electric power in the generators and further loss of energy in the electric motors that power the propellers. Oddly hybrid power works in cars. The engine runs at its perfect efficient rpm and charges a battery and then on to the electric motors. It works because a car is driven in many different modes of speed and stop and go. A ferry is nominally a constant speed device until docking and departure.
Contract for hybrid ferries that can charge or run on diesel gensets at much improved total efficiency. You can also run diesels with virtually no emissions off ethanol, methanol, natural gas, biomethane from landfills or sewage treatment plants Ammonia too. Any fuel but diesel that is not locked to the NOx/Soot curve due the the fuels physics. Oil based fuels will always produce soot or NOx in high pressure combustion systems due to the long chain carbon carbon bonds.
Cummins and Clearfire both have MCCI what a diesel technically is (mixture controlled compression ignition) engines that get zero NOx and zero soot but only running on methane,ethanol,ethane. Propane and butane get close to zero any longer chain CH2-CH2 and you get soot or to burn out the soot NOx.
Washington State has the largest ferry system in the USA. You can see the ferry dock to Whidbey Island from the deck of my sister’s multi million dollar home over the Sound. We take the ferry to the island to see my buddies kid on the Navy base he is with the growler unit there.
Why is this an either/or proposition?
Both/and.
Nope direct drive is not more efficient not with modern electric motors and rectifier / inverters.
Having huge diesels ramping up and down load following also burns a lot of extra fuel as the BSFC map clearly will show a peak efficiency zone for any given engine it is near the 75% full load point and mid range rpm. Running an engine away from that point means lost combustion products , soot, unburnt hydrocarbons , NOx if you go lean burn. Running smaller generators at their peak BSFC point is always going to be more efficient than running a single large engine ramping up and down with loads. You can also shut down some or all of your smaller gensets and run off the pack for peaks and valleys of the load point. It’s been conclusively proven that hybrids are more efficient it’s not even up for debate the hard data is just to plentiful. You can drive two identical Toyota’s one Camry is a hybrid the other is pure ICE the hybrid will be getting 20-30 mpg better mileage it really is that simple now. Toyota is not even making the nonhybrid version anymore the Camry is 100% electric drive units now. The Corolla will follow probably in 2026.
Diesel locomotives that add a small hybrid pack are getting 50% reductions in fuel burn over 250+ mile trips which is typical of a regional class loco. A single box car of LFP cells can send a 100 car locomotive 150 miles all by itself. Old timers don’t fathom how far tech has come now this is not 1960 it’s the 21st century we have suitcase sized packs that can put out 200+ kilowatts that’s 260+ hp more than enough to push any consumer sized vehicle to illegal speeds in under 10 seconds. The link for the ultra caps above show 8kg worth is 500+ horsepower on tap. This is the 21st century.
In the North Sea between the UK and Norway that sea will kill you if you go in without a survival suit and flotation. In the winter about 3 minutes, in the summer maybe 30 minutes. But you will die. As your body cools the natural reaction is to shunt blood to central organs and the brain. You loose function of your arms and legs and drown. Fortunately you may be unconscious. (North Sea Oil Rig worker in the 70s and early 80s.) I miss it all dearly but today it is just an old man's fond memories. The North Sea was good and bad and tragic. Google "Alexander Kieland sinking." I was on it a few months before it went down. It took some of my friends.
My bad clearfire is steam boilers with zero emissions, Clearflame is the MCCI engine company. They modify engines to be zero emissions and also run on soot free fuels. Ammonia is already being used as a shipping fuel you can make it from thin air too using N2 from the air and H2 from nuclear power spitting water so it’s a forever fuel. Off peak wind in the middle of the night at $5 per megawatt hour or less makes for some cheap ammonia as well. Its easy to store, farmers transport it, use it for fertilizer injections and some burn it to power pumps by the millions of tonnes per year. The handling certs and infrastructure are well known and it is one of the most used chemicals World wide.
https://x.com/ClearFlameEng/status/1800942468600369235
Yep, on board diesels to generate electricity to charge the batteries that run the ship. How environmentally cool is that? Our gas tax for the Climate Commitment Act must be going for that, possibly, maybe, dunno.
If it’s a hybrid, it’s going to be running on fossil fuel.
People are going to die on this thing. It’s bad enough you can’t put out a class D fire on a ferry deck. You get a class D fire in the engineering space with a battery this big and you will get something that will burn for over a week at the bottom of Puget Sound.
No effective fire arresting technology exists for self oxidizing fires.
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