Yes, your maths is off by roughly an order of magnitude because the starting assumptions are wrong.
> The mwh price is 80–90$, so 3 gwh (3000mwh) would be about 240K $
You’re effectively designing around ~3GWh for an ocean leg, but a large container vessel at 40–60MW continuous draw burns roughly 1–1.5GWh per day at sea.
A 20–30 day crossing needs on the order of 20–40GWh of shaft power, not 3GWh. 5,000t of HFO actually corresponds to ~50–60GWh of chemical energy and ~25–30GWh delivered to the propeller at realistic engine efficiencies.
> The mwh price is 80–90$
$80–90/MWh is a generation/LCOE number, which you're comparing to $500/t HFO delivered, stored, with global bunkering logistics already in place.
You're not accounting for the cost of delivering tens of GWh at hundreds of MW into a hull, in a tight port stay, via infrastructure that simply doesn’t exist. Even if you grant free electricity at the fence, the capex for multi-hundred-MW substations, converters, cabling, connectors, etc completely dominates.
> A shipment of 7-9K EVs at 50kwh each, pretty much gets you there. That's the capacity of some of the new ships that BYD uses for transporting their EVs around the world. 2000EVs is basically about 1 gwh of power.
2,000 EVs * 50kWh ≈ 100MWh. 9,000 EVs * 50kWh ≈ 450MWh. That’s still one to two orders of magnitude below what a long-range deep-sea vessel actually needs on a single leg.
> We'll know in a few years how wrong you or I will be.
Anyone in or close to the maritime industry knows now. Not even the most bullish consider economic transoceanic shipping by battery-powered vessels by the 2040s remotely possible. Realistically pure-battery transoceanic cargo ships will never happen, because other superior zero-carbon options will become viable long before batteries close the energy density and infrastructure gap.
We'll obviously see batteries in tugs, ferries, short-sea and hybrid ECA work become the standard much sooner.
> The mwh price is 80–90$, so 3 gwh (3000mwh) would be about 240K $
You’re effectively designing around ~3GWh for an ocean leg, but a large container vessel at 40–60MW continuous draw burns roughly 1–1.5GWh per day at sea.
A 20–30 day crossing needs on the order of 20–40GWh of shaft power, not 3GWh. 5,000t of HFO actually corresponds to ~50–60GWh of chemical energy and ~25–30GWh delivered to the propeller at realistic engine efficiencies.
> The mwh price is 80–90$
$80–90/MWh is a generation/LCOE number, which you're comparing to $500/t HFO delivered, stored, with global bunkering logistics already in place.
You're not accounting for the cost of delivering tens of GWh at hundreds of MW into a hull, in a tight port stay, via infrastructure that simply doesn’t exist. Even if you grant free electricity at the fence, the capex for multi-hundred-MW substations, converters, cabling, connectors, etc completely dominates.
> A shipment of 7-9K EVs at 50kwh each, pretty much gets you there. That's the capacity of some of the new ships that BYD uses for transporting their EVs around the world. 2000EVs is basically about 1 gwh of power.
2,000 EVs * 50kWh ≈ 100MWh. 9,000 EVs * 50kWh ≈ 450MWh. That’s still one to two orders of magnitude below what a long-range deep-sea vessel actually needs on a single leg.
> We'll know in a few years how wrong you or I will be.
Anyone in or close to the maritime industry knows now. Not even the most bullish consider economic transoceanic shipping by battery-powered vessels by the 2040s remotely possible. Realistically pure-battery transoceanic cargo ships will never happen, because other superior zero-carbon options will become viable long before batteries close the energy density and infrastructure gap.
We'll obviously see batteries in tugs, ferries, short-sea and hybrid ECA work become the standard much sooner.