Thread

The Return of Sail Power: Cargo Ships Are Turning Back to the Wind

193 points · 136 comments · gumby

darksaints · 1789670926 · focus · HN ↗
As both a sailor and a wingsail designer, I've followed this space for a long time. I've gotta say this is just one of the thousands of trial PR announcements for different companies which develop something and think it's gonna save the world.
<a href="https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
We've been seeing these every other year or so ever since the walker wingsail back in the mid 80's:
<a href="https://www.change-climate.com/Transport_Land_Sea_Sustainable/Assisted_Ships_Sails_Solar_Projects_Marine_Pollution/Walker_WingSails.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.change-climate.com/Transport_Land_Sea_Sustainabl...
As to why they are never successful, I don't exactly know. Most of the companies that put these on trial just quietly retire them without adoption, and never explain why. It's not about ease of use, plenty of designs have near 100% automation and simple design. It's not really about maintenance, plenty of designs have almost maintenance-free design as well.
My best guess is that sails/wingsails/rotorsails have inherent height, which interferes with bridges and gantry cranes, and requires furling/stowing capabilities which them makes the systems a lot more complex. My next best guess is that in order to get meaningful propulsion, you introduce heeling, which is bad for container ships and potentially catastrophic for dry bulk.
1. sandworm101 · 1789672787 · focus · HN ↗
  Unpredictability. The sails do reduce costs/fuel but they do so in a rather unpredictable manner. Cargo hauling is all about rigid scheduals and precalculated costs: contracts to deliver at an exact time and load an exact amount of fuel. Unpredictable elements, even if on average mostly good, do not mesh with that culture.
  1. darksaints · 1789673332 · focus · HN ↗
    Delivery at an exact time is of course a constraint, but I’ve never seen any sort of constraint on the exact fuel usage. This isn’t anything like aviation where excess fuel has to be dumped in order to land safely. If you don’t use the fuel for your voyage, you just fill up less for your next voyage. Weight effects are countered via water ballast, as they always have been.
    And sails for power augmentation do not complicate timelines at all. If there’s not enough wind, you use more fuel. Nobody has meaningfully proposed relying 100% on wind propulsion.
  2. dofm · 1789674074 · focus · HN ↗
    It's not about schedules. These things don't change when you arrive; they change how much it costs to arrive and how heavy you arrive.
    So the only logical explanation is that they don't do that by enough to be worth installing and maintaining, or for fuel market systems to adapt to an amount of oversupply.
    The industry clearly adapts to an amount of undersupply; ships are fairly often going to burn more fuel than the route might ordinarily need due to being held up or weather or the need to reroute, are they not? So it doesn't seem implausible that the market would adapt to this; it's going to average out quite quickly. It is presumably therefore about the juice not being worth the squeeze.
    This doesn't rule out illogical explanations.
    (Belated edit for clarity)
  3. trog · 1790027309 · focus · HN ↗
    Heh, I work for a freight forwarder and spent half the day yesterday explaining to customers that the margin of error on their containers is currently between 1 to 2 weeks.

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