Wind Energy Meets Recycling In The Cargo Shipping Industry

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The cargo shipping industry is finally getting serious about making a dent in its greenhouse gas emissions. In a case of everything old is new again, wind energy is emerging as one key solution. Advocates for battery-electric power are also pushing for a seat at the decarbonization table, and a new study suggests they could have a point — but only if the very longest voyages are exempted.

21st Century Wind Energy For The Cargo Shipping Industry

When someone mentions wind energy and cargo ships in the same breath nowadays, they generally don’t mean massive swaths of canvas stretching against the breeze. Shipping stakeholders have been introducing wind energy in the form of rigid devices that look nothing like conventional sails (see more rigid sail background here).

One technology to catch the CleanTechnica eye is a tall, rotating cylinder that looks like an oversized smokestack, developed by the Finnish firm Norsepower and marketed under the name Rotor Sail.

The resemblance to a smokestack is all on the surface. The Rotor Sail harnesses the Mangus effect, a phenomenon that occurs when a spinning object moves through air.

“When wind meets the spinning Rotor Sail, the air flow accelerates on one side of the Rotor Sail and decelerates on the opposite side of the Rotor Sail. The change in the speed of air flow results in a pressure difference, which creates a lift force that is perpendicular to the wind flow direction,” Norsepower explains.

Tilt-Able Wind Energy Devices, Made With Recycled Plastic

Norsepower launched with a business model aimed at taking full advantage of its unique approach to harvesting wind energy for cargo ships, starting with a fuel savings of up to 28% or more, depending on the conditions.  Norsepower also bills the Rotor Sail as a tilt-able device that can assume a horizontal position, enabling ships to pass under low bridges. In a sustainability plus, the device can can be retrofitted onto existing ship, or installed on new builds.

Norsepower also recently won approval to market Rotor Sail as an explosion-proof wind energy device, enabling it to be placed in hazard zones on cargo ships. The certification was rendered by the global classification society DNV.

“As the first-ever approval for a Wind Assisted Propulsion System (WAPS) to be used in hazardous zones onboard vessels, the DNV certification of the NPRS™ EX version sets a new milestone for the maritime sector,” the company explains.

With attention turning to lifecycle emissions and biodiversity conservation, Norsepower has also partnered with the Biodiversity Pilot Programme under the wing of NEFCO, the Nordic Green Bank.

“During the programme, NEFCO has helped Norsepower map out its impact on biodiversity and shared applicable processes and circular economy concepts from the wind power industry,” Nefco explains. The circular economy part of the picture includes deploying recycled plastic to fabricate the Rotor Sails.

“A typical sail can contain 300,000 recycled PET bottles,” Norsepower CEO Tuomas Riski told Nefco, the Nordic Green Bank last year. That locks in the PET for at least 25 years, which is the expected usable lifespan of the wind energy device.

More Recycling For The Futuristic Sails Of The Future

The PET recycling timeline of 25 years or more provides an interesting contrast to other circular economy deployments of recycled plastic. The plastics industry has focused much attention on recycling old plastic bottles into new plastic bottles. That can help avoid extracting virgin petroleum to feed the petrochemical industry, but it perpetuates the frequency of an energy-sucking loop that consumes transportation fuels as well as resources at the recycling facility.

If you have any thoughts about that, drop us a note in the comment thread. In the meantime, Norsepower has added another type of recycling to its wind energy roster. In addition to deploying recycled materials in the Rotor Sail, the whole thing can be lifted out and transferred to another ship.

“A rotor sail can be dismantled from a ship and installed on another ship relatively easily, ” Norsepower Chief Customer Operation Officer Jukka Kuuskoski told Seatrade Maritime News in an interview this past September, when the company was working on its first “recycle retrofit.”

“This is a benefit when a shipowner decides to sell or decommission a ship which has Norsepower Rotor Sails,” Kuuskoski  elaborated, “The rotor sail units can be refurbished and installed on the next vessel to reduce fuel consumption and emissions still for many years.”

“We believe that such a second-hand market will be created when the installed number or rotor sails on the market increases and the standardised Norsepower Rotor Sails are in high demand,” he added.

Wind Energy Good, Wind Energy Plus Batteries Better

To maximize the fuel savings of the Rotor Sail and other wind energy devices, cargo shippers can also deploy sophisticated route planning technology that enables them to take advantage of favorable wind conditions. That raises the possibility of ditching liquid fuel altogether and depending on a combination of battery-electric power and wind energy.

That may prove to be an elusive target, at least for cargo ships. “While better battery technology in recent years has meant EVs with longer ranges, ships are vastly heavier than cars and can travel very long distances between ports. These heavy weights and long distances have led some to think that electrifying shipping isn’t feasible,” notes Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a branch of the US Department of Energy.

Nevertheless, recent improvements in battery technology have made the impossible more possible. “Declining battery costs coupled with increasing battery energy densities, cleaner grids, optimized vessel operations, and valuing the battery’s second life create a unique electrification opportunity in domestic shipping,” explains Won Young Park, an energy policy researcher at Berkeley Lab.

Park is the lead author of a new Berkeley Lab study indicating that passenger ships are ripe for electrification, if the very longest trips are excluded. The findings could be extrapolated to apply to cargo ships as well.

“Park and his colleagues found that excluding just 1% of the longest trips made electrifying the ships much more feasible, allowing for batteries two-thirds smaller than would be needed for the longest trips. For passenger ships, the size could be reduced by 85%, they found,” Berkeley Lab explains. The research team also identified electric tugboats as low-hanging fruit for shipping electrification.

Some shipping stakeholders are also focusing attention elsewhere. Keep an eye out for niche cargo services that deploy wind energy on smaller shipping vessels, which can access a wider variety of seaports and take advantage of competitive warehouse-to-warehouse timetables.

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Photo: Wind energy is making a comeback in the shipping industry, along with new opportunities to make an impact on the circular economy (courtesy of Norsepower).