Back in 2014 one of Norway’s major ferry companies, Norled, announced the world’s first fully electric battery powered car ferry. Now electric ferries are becoming the latest must-have for one of the world’s most maritime-travel intense nations.
If you’ve ever seen a map of Norway, you’ll know that ferries are a big deal. It’s coastline has thousands of fjord inlets, and if you take into account all of them, it has 25,148 km of coastline – the 8th longest in the world. Just behind Australia (25,760) and well ahead of The U.S. (19,924) and China (14,500).
Named ‘Ampere’ after the unit of electric current, it went into service in June of 2015 and in its first two years sailed a distance equivalent to 4 times around the Equator, racking it up 6 km at a time by shuttling back and forth between two little ports called Lavik and Oppedal.
The boat stops for only 10 minutes at each end, and using a charger from Corvus Energy it gets an electric top up in those 10 minutes and a full re-charge overnight. It makes 34 crossings a day. With no fossil fuel expenses. No wonder Norled’s competitors want one.
Others are jumping in on the electric ferry future
The largest ferry operator in Norway – Fjord 1 – ordered en electric ferry from the same class as Ampere – ZeroCat – but of course it boasts higher speeds and carries more cars and people. Ferries and passenger boats run by Fjord1 carry 10.5 million vehicles and 21.5 million passengers a year.
And these aren’t the only electric ferries in the country:
- in late January Fjord 1 received a delivery of two Turkey-manufactured electric ferries
- the country’s public transport provider Boreal has one on order
- on the scenic touring side of things a 400 passenger catamaran “Future of the Fjords” will start cruising the waters of the country’s famously majestic fjords in April (see video below)
- and Siemens sees the market as so promising that it is moving its battery production for electric marine vessels to Norway this spring
Beyond that, they also look pretty neat.
We sometimes forget that the path to batteries and chargers and other systems that can get us to a drastically reduced carbon future are being built and tested every day in applications like these.
They get better and better with each iteration, and the learning and technology is used not just in other boats but in both personal items like car chargers and mega-sized industrial items like electric storage for wind and solar farms.
On Norway!! (and they’re also leading the medal count at the Winter Olympics!)