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by marcosdumay 1614 days ago
Electrifying boats should be easier than cars. It's probably just not that much of a priority because fuel costs are much less relevant.

On a second though, transportation modes tend to fall on a curve where the more relevant are the fuel costs, the harder they are to electrify. Cars and buses are just on a sweet spot of the curve.

1 comments

You can buy solar powered electrified boats, even with solar they have short ranges and low speeds. Fine for a pleasure trip but not even close to enough for say a tugboat.

The extreme end is icebreakers which actually sometimes use nuclear power because even fossil fuels have energy density issues. Not that we need to replace nuclear icebreakers, but many countries use the non nuclear version, and when you start talking ~100MW * weeks the batteries needed get crazy.