"415 metric tons of goods. That means they have about five times more cargo space than an airplane, but are five times smaller in length than a typical container ship."

Not to take anything away from this (it's great), but for reference, an average vessel in Maersk's fleet can carry about 100,000 metric tons so you'd need about 250 of these to replace a single container ship.

Not sure why the article decided to compare cargo capacity of a airplane with the length of a container ship, but alas.

• bluGill

  today at 3:44 PM

  This might be useful for a tiny island. Ship from a large Caribbean island to a small one for example. The distance means the round trip is day (night?) trip, and there a things you want shipped in every day, but airplanes are expensive. I'm sure there are other niches where there is only a small amount of cargo going from point A to point B as well. However in general the world needs more cargo and so this doesn't make sense for most.

  • ZeroGravitas

    today at 4:05 PM

    Island hopping is a niche where electric flight might get started.

    Hawaii is looking at running some next year.

    https://www.sfgate.com/hawaii/article/hawaii-electric-airpla...

    • newsclues

      today at 4:45 PM

      They do it on Vancouver Island in B.C.

      • WorkerBee28474

        today at 5:26 PM

        It doesn't appear to be in normal operation, but it has been tested:

        https://harbourair.com/going-electric

  • mattas

    today at 3:49 PM

    I actually think there's an argument to be made for this to be an alternative to typical cargo ship operations.

    The challenge when moving goods via ocean vessel is that everything takes _a long_ time. Loading and unloading the vessel can take days. Transit is weeks. Unloading the vessel takes days.

    You have 2 options now: air freight which is crazy expensive but gets it there in a few days max or ocean freight which is relatively cheap but might take weeks. If you can cut out vessel loading/unloading you save at least a week.

    • amdsn

      today at 4:54 PM

      I find it hard to believe that you wouldn't lose any time you gain in loading/unloading to transit time inconsistency when you have to rely on wind. This is not even to mention the fact that these ships cannot make good use of big modern ports with cranes and the best logistical connections and that it would take 100+ of them with hundreds of crew to move as much as a single container ship can with 20 people. I could see them being useful in niche scenarios like cabotage within island/archipelago nations or shipping small loads on irregular schedules, but for anything else it is very hard to beat a container ship.

    • devonkim

      today at 5:30 PM

      This is HN, we can use an analogy of TCP window size or UDP packet size in an underlying high latency medium and the receiver and sender have very high processing costs. So perhaps solving the unloading and loading logistics is also worth optimizing for like we did almost for free in computing space? But because we don't have ballpark numbers of each terribly well we're going to have some difficulties with a valid non abstract system design discussion.

  • SirFatty

    today at 3:48 PM

    Maybe they might not be restricted to Long Beach or Port Newark.

    • bluGill

      today at 4:30 PM

      Those ports have the rest of the infrastructure though and so it makes other logistics worse

• pier25

  today at 5:13 PM

  The important metric should be emissions per metric ton though, including construction of the ships.

• __sy__

  today at 3:50 PM

  This was my exact intuition. At 450 metric ton, we're three orders of magnitude away from what large container ships can do. It's a nice PoC but this is clearly just PR from DHL.

  Air freight is also an odd comparison since it's usually time-sensitive and/or pricey ($100+ per pound).

  • wongarsu

    today at 4:52 PM

    It's DHL. If you want your package or pallet shipped to some island it might take a long while until a big container ship makes the next stop there. If it can stop there at all. For a package/freight company, the capability to run ships on your schedule to small harbors is valuable. And a catamaran could be a competitive alternative to other smaller container ships

    What I don't understand is that they are talking about running it trans-Atlantic. Taking longer than a normal container ship, while taking less cargo. You save on fuel, but surely the crew costs must be eating up all those savings. And you're not really faster. Unless the plan is to go point-to-point between smaller harbors, making up any lost time by saving on cargo handling time

    • b40d-48b2-979e

      today at 5:50 PM

      Your crew isn't emitting hundreds of tons of CO2 burning the dirtiest fuel available on earth, though.

  • Arnt

    today at 4:54 PM

    Smallish container ships are used a lot. Look at traffic from the big ports like Rotterdam to small ports like Orkanger or Kristiansand.

    A lot of containers take a small-ship trip after the big-ship one.

• ffsm8

  today at 5:39 PM

  Urm, it's pretty well documented that historically the biggest deciding factor in shipping is cost. The size of the vessel and the travel speed are unimportant vs cost of the journey. So if they can essentially remove fuel cost, they're able to reduce the shipping cost and hence outcompete bigger vessels on the only metric that had historically mattered in that industry

• cbmuser

  today at 5:39 PM

  [flagged]

Let's see it last. It won't. This is just a short-term private endeavor/vanity-press project. Just because a business uses a "sustainable technology" does not make it a sustainable business. Comparing cargo ships to airplanes is apples vs. oranges and reveals the author's deliberate "headline" motivation and lack of technology understanding compared to the actual ground truth of shipping.

Until fuel prices change for the long-term and/or emissions regulations have an order of magnitude uptick as well as covering far more than sulfur (see IMO 2020 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MARPOL_73/78#IMO_2020 ), there will be zero economic incentive to use wind-power over diesel/bunker-fuel power.

And no, any advantages of docking at smaller ports are defeated by those ports having less land-transit access and we already have fleets of (smaller) cargo vessels serving these ports at insanely low $/ton/mile rates.

Just like farms, all of the economics point to larger vessels, larger ports, and operating entity consolidation. See "The Box" by Marc Levinson https://a.co/d/0gtBkWwt or watch a few "What's Going On With Shipping" https://www.youtube.com/@wgowshipping videos.

It will take some sort of global political or environmental catastrophic externality to even budge, let alone change, the status quo.

• mmooss

  today at 6:21 PM

  That sounds so familiar. I swear I once read the same comment about renewable energy generation. :)

At the risk of sounding overly negative, these things are pretty much always vanity projects. Someone wanted a really cool boat and managed to get some investors onboard. It’s more about an aesthetic than a business case.

We’re talking here about a fairly large crew that will transport a small amount of cargo while taking a really long time. On top of that, these aren’t container ship so loading/unloading will take a long time. There is no economic case here.

The only way you can make this somewhat work is by selling the aesthetic/story. E.g.: this coffee was shipped by sailboat. But even then, notice how every company linked in the article of another commenter aren’t actually operating anymore…

In the big picture I am again and again fascinated by this. One of the oldest commercial services out there (post / shipping) proves repeatedly to be very innovative and strong in realization of new stuff like this. They were the first or one of the first, who deployed electrical cargo vans. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetscooter

To be accurate, they bought the startup. But still: they didn't wait for the automotive company to come up with a e cargo van.

Someone should make a sport out of this.

We already have sailing sports where people race all kinds of wind-powered vessels, and they push the envelope of tech development, just like F1 and the car industry.

Also rich people love this sort of thing. Give them something to do with all that money that has some sort of chance of improving things.

• mockerell

  today at 4:09 PM

  Look no further! SailGP is pretty much the maritime version of F1

• colechristensen

  today at 4:24 PM

  The startup building and operating the boats was founded by a famous yacht racer

For anyone interested in economics and life cycle math (for sailing in general, not the trimarans they are using here) I recommend https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2021/05/how-to-design-a-sa...

I love this idea, but do these ships exist yet? I can only find renderings, and the company's "roadmap" page is not a roadmap (https://vela-transport.com/feuille-de-route/).

The only real footage I can find is a construction video from a year ago: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DL9CSLdtkaP/

• jeroenhd

  today at 4:11 PM

  The ships aren't new, but a large transport operator like DHL buying into the concept is.

  Well, unless you count pre-motor cargo ships of course, those were the only option for centuries.

> "The wind-powered boats could be especially appealing when oil prices have shot up because of the Iran war."

Check of oil prices same day article was published:

WTI $73.51/bbl BRENT $77.57/bbl MURBAN: $70.46/bbl

• citrin_ru

  today at 5:14 PM

  What we see in quotes is not the price of oil being shipped right now; it is usually a one-month futures contract. Traders expect that by this time, Hormuz will reopen. If it does not, they will lose money, but the actual price could be much higher.

It's notable that setting sails will be a legitimate profitable venture. Too late to sail the seas, and too early to sail the seas.

Cargo ships powered by the wind, we are living in the future!

This will be great for their customer service, now they'll have a new excuse for losing your package.

I remember seeing news about sails on cargo ship twenty years ago?

But whatever reduces the use of "bunker fuel" which is the most toxic vile fuel around (cruise ships use it too)

This is like the 1984 calendar ripping meme except the year is 1600.

20 years ago I read this magazine article about putting kites on container ships for efficiency. This gadget seems to have durable appeal to entrepreneurs and/or suckers.

https://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2005/09/17/sa...

The company recently went bankrupt, by the way. It turns out that gigantic container ships are already incredibly efficient.

• mmooss

  today at 6:25 PM

  > This gadget seems to have durable appeal to entrepreneurs and/or suckers.

  Or most research and technological development requires years or generations of experimentation and failure before success. And every time, the creators and innovators are told they are wasting their time, suckers, look how many failures came before you, ...

• WorkerBee28474

  today at 5:31 PM

  Another version of the idea is still around:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotor_ship

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