Boatloads of megawatts

[freebeard]

Just like it's hard to beat the bandwidth of a station wagon full of CD-Rs; maybe moving electicity by ship can have a good ROI in certain situations:

Introducing Battery Tanker X

14,035 views 24 May 2023
The world’s first Battery Tanker X is a 140-meter-long electric propulsion vessel capable of transporting electricity across oceans. Renewable energy can be safely sent across the sea, connecting grids, islands, and offshore wind farms. Marine-grade batteries installed on the ship have a total capacity of 240MWh and are designed and built by PowerX, a Japanese battery startup. This unique ship is planned to be fully certified by international standards, including DNV and Class NK.

Sea-steading here we come.

In other news, I'm a fan of hydroelectricity, from Woody Guthrie's Roll on Columbia to my monthly bill; but it can be done wrong.

$28.3 Billion USD Three Gorges Dam Has Failed | Tofu Dreg Construction Quality |Drought & Flood (2)

[alexshock]

Last winter, when Ukraine's power infrastructure was bombed by RU, Turkey provided floating power plants, something like this:

[redpoint5]

A boatload of batteries sounds like a bad idea to me.

A floating power station should burn hydrocarbons and be quickly refuelable.

Scratch that. A floating power station should decay uranium and only need refueling every decade.

[freebeard]

IIRC Jack Rikard said that a docked aircraft carrier's shore power cable (dock to ship) carried power equivalent to a charging Tesla.

240MWh would [likely] need a chilled superconducting connector.

Maybe obsolete nuclear submarines could have their torpedo tubes turned into electrical sockets?

[oil pan 4]

The problem with batteries is they're heavy. A 2019+ leaf battery has a volume something to the tune of 60 gallons or more but weights over 900lb and only holds the energy you would get out of maybe 5 gallons of diesel if burned for electricity in a piston engine. Then if it's burned in a combined cycle gas turbine steam engine you get double the power out of that much fuel.
That 900lb battery will only let you go 200 miles or so, a diesel fuel tank would weigh half as much and power the car for more like 3,000 miles.