this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2023
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Is there a hard theoretical limit to the capacity of a primarily wind powered ship?
My understanding is that like most things you start running into issues with a) how mass scales (so at a certain point you start adding more mass of sails to push the mass of sails you added to push the mass of...) and b) structural integrity (ie, you can't just make a sky scraper taller by doubling all the dimensions; at some point steel just isn't strong enough).
There's also the issue of speed; no matter how many sails you add, the wind only goes so fast, and it doesn't go reliably. Modern shipping has deadlines and no one is going to settle for "We got becalmed" or "We lost two months because we were tacking into headwinds the whole time".
Yeah, I see what you mean. It's hard to imagine what 59.3MW of sail would look like, to match the power of the Ever Given for example, but that's equivalent to too many wind turbines to reasonably fit on such a vessel. I'm just concerned that international shipping isn't the best use of our capacity to manufacture nuclear power reactors. Cargo ships do a lot of waiting around, so a nuclear reactor might do a better job on land replacing a coal fired plant.
As for shipping speed, maybe it would be good to just go back to those lower expectations. Maybe we shouldn't be getting the things we need in a hurry from overseas. Overseas freight is kind of insane compared to just using emission-free power to manufacture things closer to where they're needed instead.
I completely agree. Our approach of simply reducing emissions from our current societal and economic structures will not scale sufficiently. The problem, as always, is capitalism. We build things further away because it's cheaper. We run international shipping on ultra tight schedules and develop systems like just-in-time logistics chains because hyper-efficiency (at the cost of intense fragility) makes more money.
These structures have to be broken, or at least heavily disincentivized, in order to make real headway in combating climate change.