holy shit, a wind powered ship. what a marvel of modern tech
But wind is unreliable, I’m excited about new hydro powered ships where the crew actually push the ship along using long water-pushing paddles.
It’s not the crew’s fault, it’s the intensive way they’re bred. We need vegan ships.
This is fascinating, the sails look quite different from what I would have imagined given the name. Looks more like those ships with the rotating cylinders on them visually, even though of course those operated on a very different principle.
Excited to see how well this works. Would be amazing if they could slash fuel usage significantly, I remember reading even those oversized kites already did a fair bit.
Amazing, I was reading about the idea of them doing this a while ago. Makes me wonder if the future of shipping will see a return to some of the old trade routes that are more favourable for the winds.
This is pretty incredible! I hope more industries adopt this mindset and begin to find ways to combat climate change. It’s going to take all industries exerting this level of change!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The Pyxis Ocean’s maiden journey, from China to Brazil, will provide the first real-world test of the WindWings - and an opportunity to assess whether a return to the traditional way of propelling ships could be the way forward for moving cargo at sea.
Enabling a vessel to be blown along by the wind, rather than rely solely on its engine, could hopefully eventually reduce a cargo ship’s lifetime emissions by 30%.
It was developed by UK firm BAR Technologies, which was spun out of Sir Ben Ainslie’s 2017 America’s Cup team, a competition sometimes called the ‘Formula One of the seas’.
“This is one of the most slow-moving projects we’ve done, but without doubt with the biggest impact for the planet,” its head John Cooper - who used to work for Formula One team McLaren - told the BBC.
“Wind power can make a big difference,” says Dr Simon Bullock, shipping researcher at the Tyndall Centre, at the University of Manchester.
He said new cleaner fuels will take time to emerge “so we have to throw everything at operational measures on existing ships - like retrofitting vessels with sails, kites and rotors”.
The original article contains 881 words, the summary contains 193 words. Saved 78%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
