After more than a year of investigating the world’s leading all-electric ferry designs, Greenline has partnered with BMT, a global leader in maritime design and engineering, to produce the ferry design for its first two routes in British Columbia waters.
Greenline and BMT worked through a collaborative process to create the design, tailoring each aspect to the local conditions as well as the intended routes and schedules.
Greenline’s CEO Callum Campbell says, “BMT has decades of experience creating robust passenger vessel designs and embracing innovations in the maritime industry. We’re very pleased we could work with them on this project and couldn’t be more excited about the resulting design.”
The vessel is a 32-meter catamaran ferry that carries up to 150 passengers, with wheelchair access and space for bicycles. It’s designed for a typical speed of 23 knots.
Alex Blake, Senior Naval Architect at BMT in Southampton (UK), whose expertise covers ferries and patrol boats, guided the Greenline ferry design.
“It's going to be a really fresh feeling boat,” says Blake. “There's no form of internal combustion on board at all and there's no trickery. It's just batteries with electric motors.”
Furthermore, the vessel is flexible for operating in the different seagoing conditions along the BC coast. While designed to operate efficiently in sheltered waters, the proven hull form is also used successfully around the world on more exposed coastlines with heavier seas.
Blake adds, “From a passenger perspective, the boats will run nearly silently. There won't be any of the vibrations that you get from a traditional diesel engine.”
Design differences: Diesel vs. all-electric
Blake says the biggest difference in designing an all-electric ferry compared to a traditional diesel-powered ferry is that designers require an understanding of the operating profile and schedule of an electric ferry in more depth – because they use these factors to directly inform the design.
“We're almost going down to a minute-by-minute basis with the operational data,” Blake says. “And we're looking at it not just on launch date, but also five or ten years into the future because we want to ensure we can achieve the same schedule at the end of the vessel's life as well.”
“We've had a great relationship working with Greenline on this. We've developed a tool that incorporates the schedule and we can use it interactively so we can run all these different scenarios that might affect the design,” he says.
Overcoming challenges to create an innovative design
Although battery technologies are progressing rapidly, one of the primary challenges in designing the vessel was incorporating the quantity of batteries needed to power it appropriately.
“Batteries aren't as energy dense as traditional fuels, so we had the physical challenge of fitting it all into the boat,” says Blake. “We also had to consider how to cool the batteries and ventilate the spaces.”
Safety considerations were a primary focus, especially in the early stages of the design. Since regulations typically lag behind new technologies, BMT engaged with the class society and regulators to apply the existing rules in a way that suited the new design. Blake says, “BMT takes a very safety-based approach to our designs, so we looked ahead at how we could mitigate any additional risks that might exist with this new technology.”
A robust, adaptable design
Blake says the core design of the Greenline boat can be modified in various ways to suit different routes in the future.
“If we wanted to go slower, we might be able to take some batteries out, but equally if we wanted to go for a further distance, we could maintain the current batteries and optimise for that,” says Blake. “None of this would radically change the design of the vessel.”
The vessel is also designed with multiple possible boarding locations, as well as articulated gangways that allow the vessel to dock at different sites.
Campbell says the Greenline team is already thinking about how the design might be adapted to suit additional routes. He says, “We hope this is just the beginning of our collaboration with BMT as we plan for passenger-only services along the BC coast.”
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