Coming this fall, residents in Stockholm won’t have to endure the hour-long drive or train ride between Ekerö, a popular suburb, and central Stockholm, home to the historic City Hall.
Instead, they can hop on a 30-passenger ferry and make the trip in half the time, helping to cut carbon dioxide emissions.
This is not your diesel ferry. It’s the P-12, an electric ferry that hovers just above the water’s surface, like a land speeder straight out of “Star Wars.”
Created by Candela, a Swedish company that has been improving the technology since 2016, the P-12 uses a hydrofoil to lift the boat above the surface of the water, reducing drag and the amount of energy needed to operate it. “The hydrofoil system reduces energy consumption by 80% compared to fossil fuel ships,” says Gustav Hemming, vice president of the Stockholm Regional Executive Board, which is responsible for public maritime transport. “This number is definitely huge and a game changer for water transportation.”
It’s not only better for the environment – a 2022 study by Stockholm’s KTH Royal Institute of Technology found that the P-12 emits 97.5% less carbon dioxide than diesel ferries – but it’s also supposed to give a ride quieter, what Hemming describes as a “magic”. carpet” experience.
“Flying over water, the body of the P-12 rises above water friction,” he says. This means less noise, a more stable ride and none of the diesel fumes that put some people off ferry travel. “Foil technology works much like airplane wings that provide lift as water flows over them and creates a pressure difference,” adds Hemming.
Stockholm will not be the only city with these futuristic ferries. Candela’s P-12s will soon operate in Berlin, Germany, and eight ships are being built for NEOM, Saudi Arabia’s $1.5 trillion “megacity project” for the ultra-rich, with a 2025 delivery date.
Candela representatives were even in New York last August, offering test rides from New York Harbor and meeting with potential customers. Could this mean floating ferries are coming to Manhattan soon? Hemming is tight-lipped, saying only that they are “in talks with many private operators around the world, including New York.” And “if” it happens, hypothetically, a P-12 trip between Hoboken Terminal and Chelsea Market would take less than three minutes, compared to the current half-hour drive or train ride. The electric ferry ride from Staten Island to lower Manhattan, which currently takes about 25 minutes, can be done at 11.
Electric ferries – which run on land-charged batteries rather than diesel – aren’t exactly new. Norway introduced the world’s first electric ferry service in 2015. And Finland’s ferry system went all-electric in 2017.
But recent years have seen a boom in ferry innovation, with all-electric fleets appearing in countries such as Spain, India, Portugal, Denmark, Thailand and New Zealand. The electric boat market, worth an estimated $4.3 billion globally this year, is projected to grow to nearly $17 billion by 2032, according to Fortune Business Insights.
The US has been slow to join the electric ferry revolution. The nation’s first electric ferry was introduced in Gee’s Bend, Ala., in 2019, and it didn’t exactly capture the nation’s imagination. Several other cities and states have been working to introduce e-ferries, including Washington state, which (after repeated delays due to unexpected costs over the past few years) may finally get its first electric fleet in the year 2028.
New York has had similar trouble getting their electric ferry initiatives off the ground, despite being a prime candidate for the technology. The city has set an ambitious goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050. And Niagara Falls, just seven hours to the north, has offered a model of what’s possible, launching its first ferries all-electric tourist in 2020.
There were promising signs in 2022, when New York Cruise Lines announced a partnership with Swedish company Green City Ferries. Together, they would build the Beluga24, a high-speed, zero-emission, low-noise ferry capable of carrying 147 passengers and 28 bicycles, which would debut in New York Harbor in the spring of 2024 But the departure date came and went, and no ferry materialized.
“We were a little early in New York,” says Hans Thornell, founder and CEO of Green City Ferries. (Representatives from New York Cruise Lines declined to comment.) He says there were problems with the Port’s charging infrastructure and it was becoming increasingly difficult to get batteries that “meet MADE IN USA rules.”
Thornell refers to the century-old Jones Act, which stipulates that all ships carrying goods between US ports must be made in the US. “Our Swedish battery supplier Echandia has recently set up a manufacturing plant in Washington state,” he says. “Now we’re just looking for an investor who’s interested in zero-emission water travel.”
Not everyone is enthusiastic about the possibilities. Joan Sammon, founder of a boutique oil and gas consulting firm, says most proponents of “green travel options” like to pretend the technology “is being built by union workers in Michigan. Far from that reality, the battery industry which US and global consumers rely on for its ‘green battery technology’, including ferries, is almost entirely controlled by China, a communist country with an extremely poor record of meeting environmental standards.
Even to ensure that all parts and manufacturing are ethically sourced, there is still the issue of cost. Patrick Finn, a former marine technology analyst who now works as a porter in Newport, Maine, says the reason countries like Denmark, Sweden and Norway are leading the electric ferry race is because they have “one of the longest-running schemes of air pollution taxes.” Their governments “support cutting-edge innovation through grants and encourage companies to take risks and experiment,” he says.
At least in some parts of the US, that is beginning to change. In California, the San Francisco Bay Ferry, a public passenger ferry transit service that carries about 8,000 passengers each weekday, recently secured an $11 million grant from the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) to build high-speed electric ferries.
“This program will help the United States catch up with the rest of the world when it comes to reducing marine greenhouse gas emissions,” says Tom Hall, the company’s director of operations. While the costs of building the first fleet won’t be small—they hope to launch SF Bay Ferry’s first electric ferry in 2026—Hall expects that in the long run, the operating costs of electric ferries “will be more lower than our current oil fleet.”
This may not be true if the technology continues to become more sophisticated. Last summer, Norwegian technology company Zeabuz unveiled the MF Estelle, the world’s first fully autonomous zero-emission ferry. Along with marine radar, LiDAR and a marine-specific AIS transponder, the ferry is operated by an “AI Captain” algorithm, says Zeabuz co-founder and CEO Øyvind Smogeli.
The AI captain is trained using an advanced simulator or “virtual world”, which includes a wide range of operational scenarios. Its navigation skills are “safer and more efficient than the average human captain,” Smogeli tells The Post. “With over 80% of all accidents at sea due to human error, an ‘AI Captain’ doesn’t have to be perfect to save many lives.”
In Denmark, another innovative electronic ferry called Ellen is setting the bar even higher. Introduced in 2019 (at a cost of $23.6 million, about 40% more than traditional ships), Ellen is able to travel further than most electric ferries – 22 nautical miles – and carry up to 200 passengers and 30 cars. It also has a massive amount of power, over 50 times the battery capacity of a Tesla. And according to a BBC report, it could only reduce CO2 emissions by 2,000 tonnes each year.
But Hemming insists that bigger isn’t always better, especially when it comes to electric ferries. Most ferries built for intra-city or coastal transport are capable of carrying 300 or more passengers, he says, but usually don’t fill all their seats.
“In Stockholm, ships usually carry 10% of their passenger capacity,” he says. “So fuel and money are spent driving around a lot of empty seats.” With the P-12 large enough to carry just 30 passengers, it’s also more affordable to build, so cities can afford a larger fleet of ships. “Think of the P-12 as a city bus on water,” says Hemming.
Sooner or later, he says, electric ferries are coming to cities like New York and will change the way people use public transportation. “It will be a paradigm shift in the maritime industry, just like when cars and buses replaced boats in transport,” says Hemming. “Now it’s the other way around – we’re going to see a return to shipping on our waterways.”
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Image Source : nypost.com