Ferry boats move tens of thousands of people across waterways each day, but this one is electric – and never needs to worry about charging!
Various ferries are already cable-guided, especially in smaller channels with strong currents. A really neat electric ferry in Denmark uses not only cables to guide itself across the channel, but it also has a super-long extension cord that runs across the channel too! This means that it’s a fully electric ferry boat that never needs to be charged. Heck yeah!
Randers Fjord Ferry uses 350 meters (just under 1,150 feet) of hardened, waterproof electrical cable that’s rolled up on a drum to power itself.
The manager of Randers Fjord Ferry says that, for the tens of thousands of tourists they carry each year, they have to make roughly 88 trips per day. On a given day on their old dual-diesel generators, they’d have to go through 100 liters (26.4 gallons) of fuel. Now, they use only about 150-200 kWh of “fuel” in a day. (Though they do still keep the diesel generators on board for emergencies.)
It’s a great idea and seems like an easy add-on to a cable ferry. Plus, since the ferry is already pulling itself along via the cables, the energy needed to get the craft going is a lot less — it would probably eat up more power if it had to power some propellers to churn through the water.
We hope to see more of these soon, though!
