Automated cargo ships
powered by nature.
Wind + Solar, Together For Reliability
Our primary propulsion system is our wing sails, with battery-electric auxiliary propulsion to get us in and out of harbors and through periods of low wind.
Our biggest challenge is making sure that we always have enough stored energy to operate the vessel, motor through periods of no wind, and have enough left over when we come into port to make it safely to and from the dock. We capture energy in two ways – from regenerative propulsion and from flexible solar panels that we use to skin the wing sails and cover other vessel surfaces. The excess energy is stored in an onboard battery bank to power actuation, hotel loads (including refrigerated containers), and to propel the ship when necessary. This gives us the reliability to meet customer expectations and the flexibility to choose our own wind.
Energy Management & Weather
The last generation of big long-haul sailing cargo ships (built from the early 1890s until 1926) were as fast or faster than modern container ships… when the wind was with them. They lacked radios, let alone access to the fine-grained global weather data and predictions that modern seafarers take for granted. As a result, they couldn’t turn their straight line speed into fast cargo service.
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Today, we have access to global wind, wave, and solar data that allows us to choose our routes to optimize the energy we capture from the environment. Classical optimization techniques combined with deep reinforcement learning give us the tools to both determine optimal routes and optimal sail settings to deliver on our schedule commitments.
Smaller Vessels for Greater Flexibility
The physics of ships generates economic pressures that drive motor driven cargo ships to the largest possible size, constrained only by the size of ports and the volume of cargo demand. This leaves all of the smaller ports in the world out in the cold, and results in goods often taking circuitous routes from source to destination, negating much of whatever speed advantage motor driven cargo ships may possess over wind driven cargo ships and further increasing emissions by increasing the use of heavy trucks to haul goods from the largest ports to their eventual destinations.
Wind driven ships do not have nearly the physics-driven economic pressures to gigantism, enabling us to right-size our vessels for particular ports and trades and direct goods by the most direct possible sea route. This will enable us to deliver better door to door transit times with fewer loadings and unloadings than the current system.