25 June 2024 (Lloyd's List) - THE electricity requirements of ports are set to surge in the coming years as the industry decarbonises, and ports will face severe challenges in securing the energy they will require.
The main challenge is that the port sector will be one of just many, including the wider maritime sector, that will be desperate for clean energy.
“This transition represents a paradigm shift towards direct and indirect electrification,” International Chamber of Shipping head of innovations Nelson Mojarro told a webinar hosted by the International Association of Ports and Harbours.
“That is crucial for the key activity and plans going forward not just for ports but for fuels.”
Under the current dominant fossil-fuel model, shipping’s demand for electricity is zero terawatt hours.
“But as we go through the scenarios that include the types of fuels that shipping will require in order to reduce emissions, more and more will be required of hydrogen-based fuels in order to get to net zero,” Mojarro said.
“As we push towards net zero we can see an increase in low-carbon fuels, but also an increase in the demand for electricity, all the way up to 3,000 TWh, just to produce the fuels for ships.”
To put that in context, that figure represents double the current global renewable electricity generation available globally.
Moreover, other hard-to-abate sectors will also be pushing for access to the same sources.
“This means an incredible, unprecedented demand for electricity of up to around 75,000 TWh by 2050,” Mojarro said.
And if this were not challenge enough, $630bn per year would need to be invested in upgrading electricity networks, equivalent to the requirements for solar and wind investment combined.
“The grids are stressed and will require tremendous investment to maintain 1.5°,” Mojarro said.
But maritime, which has traditionally needed nearly no electricity, is not part of the equation yet.
“We are going to be demanding electricity but we are not part of the discussions for the electricity network,” he said. “This is an important challenge we need to address.”
Port demand for electricity is set to grow as more port equipment is electrified, and as new regulation comes on stream. By 2030, containerships and cruise vessels calling at European ports, for example, will be required to plug into onshore power supplies when in port, rather than use their own generators.
“The problem is, where do you get the juice? Most of the ports seem to think that they’re going to draw from their onshore national grid and they’re going to distribute that electricity to a vessel, but it is just not that easy,” said Michaela O’Donohoe, business development manager at GE Vernova.
“The port cannot turn around to its local distribution system operator and say, where you used to reserve a peak power of something like 1 MW-3 MW for the port activities, please now make that 80 MW.
“If you’re lucky, your DSO will say ‘get in the queue and I can do that for you in 5-10 years, depending on where you are’.”
The better solution was for ports to invest in generating their own electricity.
“It is possible to generate electricity at the port that will solve the port’s needs, the tenant’s needs, and also the vessels’ needs,” O’Donohoe said.
“You can set up as an intelligent system that operates independently of the grid, so you’re not a burden on your national grid.”
GE Verona itself supplies container-sized gas turbines that can generate up to 60MW that can run on bio-diesel, hydrogen and other alternative fuels, but while these solutions can provide a port with electricity, they overlook the issue that the majority of future fuels will require electricity to produce in the first place.
Hence, the nuclear lobby is becoming increasingly interested in port power supply.
“We’re talking about moving away from fossil fuels but renewable energies — wind and solar — are suffering from two issues,” said Core Power chief executive Mikal Bøe.
“One is of course intermittency, but that comes to the nature of it. But there is also the fact that its capacity has been overestimated.”
Core Power wants to see ports use small floating nuclear power plants with fourth-generation reactors to provide their requirements.
“I'm not proposing that we build massive nuclear power plants in every port,” Bøe said.
“Conventional light-water reactor technology, which has been operating in navies and on land since the 1950s, is not appropriate for these environments.”
But smaller, vessel-based power plants could easily provide sufficient power for ports, and even allow them to export back to the grid.
Core Power’s technology would allow generation of between 20MW-75MW to be installed in ports to provide “100% clean, reliable energy all the time”, Bøe said.
