Cargo ships equipped with massive rigid sails called WindWings could save a substantial amount of fuel, considering how much of the world's goods are transported by sea.
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Allwright says renewed interest in windships started to gain steam in the early 2010s, and today there are about 30 large commercial ships using one of a number of such technologies. Shipping giantsare already experimenting with such systems. As many as 20 more are expected in the months ahead. So far, they are mostly"testbeds" to see if the concept is commercially viable.
Variations on the rigid wing concept are being tried elsewhere. One system, first developed in the 1920s, is a bigger departure.," or large carbon-fiber cylinders, move a ship along using a principle known as the Magnus effect, an aerodynamic force perpendicular to both the direction of the airstream and the axis of the rotor.
With so many overlapping interests in the shipping industry, simply getting agreement to try a system such as WindWings is no small matter, according to Jan Dieleman, president of Cargill Ocean Transportation. The shipping industry is also looking ahead to new fuels, such as ammonia and methanol, that would be cleaner burning and put out less carbon — especially if used with new wind technologies. Those cleaner fuels, however, are likely to be much costlier than today's relatively cheap, but more polluting ones.Fitting WindWings or a similar technology on a cargo ship or on oil tankers is no easy task, but it's simpler than retrofitting some other types of vessels, Collette says.
"You can see some of those old routes coming back," Cooper says."You know, there's probably an argument for continually circling the world in a single direction rather than going backwards and forwards. Just keep going round the world to take advantage of the trade winds."Previous audio and digital versions of this story said the IMO's goal was to cut the shipping industry's greenhouse gas emissions at least in half by 2050.
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