Stockholm won’t be the only city with these futuristic ferries. Candela’s P-12s will soon be operating in Berlin, Germany, and eight vessels are being built for NEOM, Saudi Arabia’s $1.5 trillion “megacity project” for the ultrarich, with a 2025 delivery date.
Candela reps were even in New York this past August, offering test rides out of New York Harbor and meeting with potential customers. Could this mean floating ferries are coming to Manhattan soon? Hemming is tight-lipped, saying only that they’re “in talks with many private operators around the world, including New York.” And “if” it happens, hypothetically, a P-12 trip between Hoboken Terminal and Chelsea Market would take less than three minutes, as opposed to the current half hour journey by car or train. The electric ferry journey from Staten Island to lower Manhattan, which currently takes around 25 minutes, could be done in 11.
Electric ferries — which run on battery packs charged on land rather than diesel — aren’t exactly new. Norway introduced the world’s first electric ferry service in 2015. And Finland’s ferry system went all-electric in 2017.
But the last few years has seen a boom in ferry innovation, with all-electric fleets popping up in countries like Spain, India, Portugal, Denmark, Thailand, and New Zealand. The electric ship market, worth about $4.3 billion globally this year, is projected to grow to nearly $17 billion by 2032, according to Fortune Business Insights.
The US has been slow to join the electric ferry revolution. The nation’s first electric ferry was introduced in Gee’s Bend, Ala., in 2019, and it didn’t exactly capture the country’s imagination. Several other cities and states have been working to introduce e-ferries, including Washington State, which (after repeated delays because of unexpected costs over the past few years) may finally get their first electric fleet in 2028.
New York has had similar problems getting their electric ferry initiatives off the ground, despite being a prime candidate for the technology. The city has set an ambitious goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050. And Niagara Falls, just seven hours north, has offered a template of what’s possible, launching their first all-electric tourist ferries back in 2020.
There were promising signs in 2022, when New York Cruise Lines announced a partnership with the Swedish company Green City Ferries. Together, they would build The Beluga24, a high-speed, zero-emission, low-wake ferry capable of holding 147 passengers and 28 bicycles, which would debut at New York Harbor by the spring of 2024. But the launch date came and went, and no ferry materialized.
“We were a bit too early in New York,” says Hans Thornell, Green City Ferries’ founder and CEO. (Reps from New York Cruise Lines declined to comment.) He says there were problems with the Harbor’s charging infrastructure, and it became increasingly difficult to obtain batteries that “met the MADE IN USA rules.”
Thornell is referring to the century-old Jones Act, which stipulates that all boats that transport goods between American ports must be manufactured in the US. “Our Swedish battery supplier Echandia has recently set up a production facility in Washington State,” he says. “Now we’re just looking for an investor who’s interested in emission-free commuting on water.”
Not everybody is enthusiastic about the possibilities. Joan Sammon, founder of a boutique oil and gas advisory firm, says that most supporters of “environmentally friendly travel options” like to pretend that the technology “is being built by union workers in Michigan. Far from that reality, the battery industry upon which U.S. and global consumers rely for its ‘green battery technology,’ including ferries, is almost entirely controlled by China, a Communist country with a stunningly poor record of upholding environmental standards.”
Even ensuring that all the parts and manufacturing are ethically sourced, there’s still the matter of cost. Patrick Finn, a former maritime technology analyst who now works as a harbormaster in Newport, Maine, says that the reason countries like Denmark, Sweden, and Norway are leading the electric ferry race is because they have “one of the longest running taxation schemes for air pollution.” Their governments “support cutting edge innovation through grants and encourage companies to take on risk and experiment,” he says.
At least in some parts of the US, that’s starting to change. In California, the San Francisco Bay Ferry, a public transit passenger ferry service which carries around 8,000 passengers every weekday, recently secured an $11 million grant from the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) to build high-speed electric ferries.
Source: https://nypost.com/2024/09/22/lifestyle/from-norway-to-nyc-electric-ferries-are-taking-over-the-globe/
