Shoring up ship power
Quite a while ago, I worked on what must have been a very early (if not the first) feasibility study for Shore-to-Ship Power at White Bay… I am delighted to finally be able to talk about it.
While the thinking has progressed, the opportunities and challenges likely have mostly stayed the same. Here are a few things I remember from the work I had done.
The three Shipping lines that we investigated had connection points at both starboard (right) and port (left) sides, at different connection voltages (11kV and 6kV), with most at 6kV. When I was conducting this study, all would have required modifications at significantly different costs.
The connection options on the shoreside ranged from automated solutions with autonomous vehicles to manual handling done by crews. The shoreside equipment will have to be designed with the maximum load in mind across the next 20 years - this is heavily influenced by the size of the ship (and amount of passengers). The constraint is mitigated by the fact that the largest ships cannot pass under Sydney Harbour Bridge.
The most interesting element of this is that you will need a frequency converter. Most ships in the world operate at 60Hz, whereas in Australia we operate at 50Hz. This specialised component would have to be included in the “footprint” installed on site.
Finally, actually getting the connection to the site will likely be by a new 33kV HV cable from one of the nearby Substations (at least 2km away). This is usually not too tricky when installing on quiet streets, however, there is a major road (Victoria Road) to cross, and this may be in reality one of the harder parts of the project.
While Sydney is not quite the first to do this, we get to rely on the hard-fought lessons learnt, the robust technical standards, and the turnkey solutions offered by many suppliers. There are even suppliers that build critical (and long lead time) components right here in Australia.
Read more here:
https://www.nsw.gov.au/media-releases/net-zero-a-shore-thing
