Battery power is an idea whose time has come, Paul Gunton believes

I once received a letter from a reader who said it would be a good idea to use battery power on deepsea ships. This was in the mid 1980s and I didn’t take his proposal seriously.

But he was ahead of his time. Last week we published an item about a Color Line ship that will be the largest hybrid ferry yet built. Its batteries will be recharged by the ship’s engines or by a shore connection to Norway’s renewable electricity.

Now, I was in Norway a couple of months ago as part of a group invited by Rolls-Royce to hear about another Norwegian project: Hurtigruten’s hybrid-powered explorer ships. Jens Lassen, who is Hurtigruten’s senior vice president for new projects, told us about them while we enjoyed an overnight trip on one of Hurtigruten’s coastal ships.

Jens has radical views about efficient ship design and had much to say about batteries. First, they are rapidly falling in price per kW-hour. So much so, that the second of the new Hurtigruten ships will have four or five times the battery capacity of the first and it will use that while it is in port.

I asked Jens where that will leave Norway’s investments in shore power. “I don’t believe much in this ‘shore power’ that people are talking about,” he said. “It’s too complicated and too expensive.”

Another thing he said was that batteries are not just for passenger ships; they are for deepsea shipping, too. Roughly 50 per cent of their fuel energy goes to waste, of course, but Jens says this is only because they have no way of storing it.

He reckons a lot of that energy could be recovered via boilers and steam turbines to generate electricity, store it in batteries and reuse it when the ship is in port.

You have to admit, there is a lot of sense in that. Do you know, I began to wonder whether it had been Jens who had written that letter all those years ago.