British wind power to drive Maersk container ship

Was tried and abandoned years ago.. Gains were nor worth complexity and cost Nuclear ships are however another matter

Odd for a company the size of Maersk not to know that ?

Were you out when they called ?

They really should /not/ use that caption to the photo without the words "Artist's impression", or something like it to show that it is an artificially generated image. If the rest of the article is to be believed, the Maersk Labrea will not be fitted with that sail for around another year.

How do you know that Maersk didn’t know that?

Maersk are leading the drive for nuclear ships.

This is probably coming straight out of their 'greenwashing' budget.

Typical Green thoughtless idea, a bit like the German Greens shutting down nuclear electricity generation then having to fire up lignite (lignite, for heaven’s sake!) power stations just to keep the lights on.

As a youngster I read my Mothers set of children’s Encyclopaedias which she had kept,amongst articles featuring things like African Postmen carrying letters with a slitted stick there was one about the new experimental Rotor Ship developed in Germany that was going to advance things. My Mother is now 96 and not much has happened yet apart a few niche projects.

GH

Does it onlyy work with British wind?

Your selective quoting really doesn't tell the story. From the section in the wiki /you/ raised (

That view stands in contrast to others that claim that due to the impressive performance, Buckau was put into service to carry bulk cargo across the North Atlantic and the Baltic sea. On 31 March 1926, Buckau, now renamed Baden-Baden sailed to New York via South America, the 6,200 nautical mile voyage across the Atlantic used only 12 tons of fuel oil, compared with 45 tons for a motor ship of the same size without rotors,[14] arriving in New York harbor on 9 May.[15]

The latter assessment seems to be more accurate, as the outcome of the Buckau experiment, resulted in the development of the next rotor ship, Barbara."

Things have improved since. See this section for what's been going on this century:

This is about wind power, not nuclear fusion ....

The Bucky and the Barbara (see the photos in the reference, above), are what might be said to be ’all rotor and very little ship’, so it’s no particular surprise that they were apparently efficient. What they certainly weren’t were 100m-long fully-loaded container ships.

And then there’s the problem of, as always with anything to do with renewables, the most efficient deployment of the rotors requiring the wind to be abeam of the ship, so that the force generated points in the same direction as the ship’s travel. For how long would that happy state of affairs occur in a transatlantic or transpacific journey?

Come to that, this whole rotor subject seems to be devoid of any calculations such as wind speed vs force generated, energy consumption of the rotor motors, statistics of wind direction variability on long voyages, etc, and it’s redolent of the renewables believers that ”the wind is always blowing somewhere”, as if that alone was a sufficient condition for the optimal use of wind-powered devices.

The UK bible for the renewable religion now states the wind ALWAYS blows strongly in the North Sea and in Scotland :)

I had a disintegrating book called 'sailing ships through the ages' or something going from Greek triremes to a rotor ship

Wind power has been around 2500 years. It was crap them and its still crap now

Only works with green flatulence]

A far better thought out project is Heart Aviation's electric airliner, which first flew a few days ago.

Ok its limited to about 150 mile hops, and carries a small engine to charge the batteries in an emergency, but for short haul 'island hops' its way cheaper than a turboprop

If the rotor had worked, why did they never build another one back then?

-- Renewable energy: Expensive solutions that don't work to a problem that doesn't exist instituted by self legalising protection rackets that don't protect, masquerading as public servants who don't serve the public.

Well the routes generally taken by the clippers and trading ships were essentially to go South to Africa with the westerlies on the beam and then NW to the US with the NE trades on the beam.

A far slower coal powered tramp steamer used a great circle route and only needed a crew of half a dozen, not fifty. And arrived in a predictable time

As with all wind power, the fickleness of the wind made it not a commercial propsition

Well its GreenSlop with probably a touch of AI thrown in to gull the gullible

As with climate change, the whole narrative depends on assumptions that are never to be questioned, let alone have calculations done on them