There are more and more electric powered ferries in the world, at least for short distances across rivers or small lakes. But one of the big problems with them is that the batteries required are massive and expensive. A ferry not only has to move something the size of a building, but it's got to push the water out of the way too. So you need far more energy than something like an electric car.
Electric ferries would be a lot easier to run if you could just, you know, plug them into the mains. So that's what the RANDERS FIORDS ferry in Denmark does. It has 350 meters of hardened waterproof electrical cable rolled up on a drum. One end is connected to the ferry. The other end is plugged into the electrical grid just there. And as we set off, all the power for the motors will be coming from the shore.
Fairen is an olive-been of half thousand tourists. We're talking about a thousand or so years ago. We've been here for a long time to get our house out of our way. Our home, our contour building, is where we're going to get our car. That's what we're going to get to. And then we're going to the sail. Fairen is going to be around 100,000 or 200 kW. Before we get to the L-trip, we have two diesel generators. If we live in a place where we normally live on a diesel-borked 100-liter bridge, it's more like a real L-d.
The most surprising thing for me is just how quiet this ferry is. There's no diesel motor churning away. And you might be thinking, okay, what if something snags on the cable? Well, this was already a cable-guided ferry. Even before it was electric, cable ferries are pretty common around the world in places like this. Channels with strong currents or shallow waters. Instead of being pushed by a propeller, the boat pulls itself across by latching onto two cables laid across the riverbed. There's not much boat traffic around here, and there are already clear rules for how to navigate around cables like that. Basically, don't pass while the ferry's in motion.
I'm not sure if there's any reason for that. They're on the bridge and the ship can pass. If we don't pass the ferry, the ferry can pass and then we can't pass. All the small boats can pass through a large ship. It takes about 4k per hour to pass, and it's the same as we're going to pass the ferry. It's not possible for the ferry to be able to pass through. This is the constant trink of the ferry.
We're not going to be seeing this on ferries across the English channel anytime soon. Plugging boats are obviously going to be limited to a few situations, and the biggest fuel burners are still going to be the massive world-traveling container ships. But this does feel like one more step in the right direction.