7/7/2023 0 Comments Don carbon logo![]() But the central idea of using a big battery may ultimately be impossible for bigger cruise ships, because batteries can’t store enough power in a small enough space-to get across an ocean, you’d need a battery that might take up much of an entire ship. Hurtigruten’s work may prove out some worthy technologies that the rest of the cruise industry could adopt. Johan Ordonez-AFP/Getty Images Batteries vs. The company plans to have a final design by 2025. To do this, the company is exploring using underwater maneuvering jets that can retract into the hull to cut drag, and a streamlined profile with a tiny cockpit-style bridge to reduce air resistance, as well as adding sails and solar panels to harness extra power. Maximizing that range means finding ways to drastically cut the ship’s energy usage. This would allow it to run for well over 300 miles before recharging. Currently, the engineers are eyeing a capacity of 60 megawatt-hours, equivalent to 1,200 Tesla Model 3 batteries. But it might work for their flagship service: a multi-stop cruise up the Norwegian coast (which also serves as a mail and transit service between isolated fjord communities) that would offer frequent opportunities to recharge.Įven with many stops, the battery would have to be huge. There was no way to make a battery that would last long enough to use on what the company calls its “expedition” cruises-where trips vary from week-long pleasure rides the Galapagos to multi-month odysseys between the Arctic and Antarctica, and fares can range from a few thousand dollars to the price of a luxury sports car. Indeed, while Hurtigruten managed to cut about 2% of overall emissions between 20-emissions per customer trip remained essentially unchanged. But despite investing more than $70 million into emissions-reduction technology, progress has been slow, which the company blames partially on energy prices, which made it more expensive to buy low-carbon biofuels. Hurtigruten is aiming for carbon-neutral operations by 2040, and to cut all scope three emissions-those from the company’s supply chain-by 2050. “That’s driven this interest and desire from within the company on driving change and being part of the solution.” ![]() “I speak to these people, and they reflect upon the massive changes that have happened just over the last decade, and it scares them,” says Skjeldam. Temperatures there are warming six times faster than the global average, bringing unseasonably hot weather, glacial retreat, and more frequent avalanches triggered by unstable snow. Hurtigruten is the largest employer in Longyearbyen, Svalbard’s main settlement. Skjeldam says the changes have to do with both customer desires for more sustainable travel, which he expects to grow in the years ahead, as well as employee demands. When he started sailing for the company in 1980, the captain said, the glacier had reached all the way to where they were floating now. He was on the bridge, having a cup of coffee with the captain, a five-decade veteran at the company, who pointed out a glacier several miles away. It wasn’t long after that Skjeldam, officially appointed as CEO in October of that year, was on a Hurtigruten ship sailing past the Svalbard archipelago, home to the world’s northernmost inhabited town. ![]() He wasn’t in consideration for the role, though, so over the course of several weeks, the ambitious then-37-year-old executive repeatedly called through to the switchboard at the office of the company’s chairman, until finally he was able to come in and give his pitch in person. Hurtigruten (the name means “Express Route” in English) was losing money, and Skjeldam, then commercial director at European budget airline Norwegian Air Shuttle, thought he could turn things around. The idea of running a cruise line occurred to Skjeldam back in 2012. The average cruise ship has around 3,000 passengers, but cruise companies have been investing in ever-bigger liners. “I think it’s sheer wrong to build bigger and bigger and bigger cruise ships,” Skjeldam says. But Daniel Skjeldam, the CEO of Hurtigruten is one of those few who doesn’t dance around one of the more uncomfortable dimensions of our climate problem: the apparent conflict between the endless pursuit of more, bigger, better, and the limits of the earth’s biosphere. Just about every CEO wants to be counted as an environmentalist these days. ![]()
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