Not to take anything away from this (it's great), but for reference, an average vessel in Maersk's fleet can carry about 100,000 metric tons so you'd need about 250 of these to replace a single container ship.

Not sure why the article decided to compare cargo capacity of a airplane with the length of a container ship, but alas.

We’re talking here about a fairly large crew that will transport a small amount of cargo while taking a really long time. On top of that, these aren’t container ship so loading/unloading will take a long time. There is no economic case here.

The only way you can make this somewhat work is by selling the aesthetic/story. E.g.: this coffee was shipped by sailboat. But even then, notice how every company linked in the article of another commenter aren’t actually operating anymore…

Until fuel prices change for the long-term and/or emissions regulations have an order of magnitude uptick as well as covering far more than sulfur (see IMO 2020 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MARPOL_73/78#IMO_2020 ), there will be zero economic incentive to use wind-power over diesel/bunker-fuel power.

And no, any advantages of docking at smaller ports are defeated by those ports having less land-transit access and we already have fleets of (smaller) cargo vessels serving these ports at insanely low $/ton/mile rates.

Just like farms, all of the economics point to larger vessels, larger ports, and operating entity consolidation. See "The Box" by Marc Levinson https://a.co/d/0gtBkWwt or watch a few "What's Going On With Shipping" https://www.youtube.com/@wgowshipping videos.

It will take some sort of global political or environmental catastrophic externality to even budge, let alone change, the status quo.

To be accurate, they bought the startup. But still: they didn't wait for the automotive company to come up with a e cargo van.

We already have sailing sports where people race all kinds of wind-powered vessels, and they push the envelope of tech development, just like F1 and the car industry.

Also rich people love this sort of thing. Give them something to do with all that money that has some sort of chance of improving things.

Check this photo:

https://vela-transport.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/FACE07...

A mid sized cargo ship has a 50_000Kw engine. A mid sized offshore wind turbine makes 1_000_000Kw. So depending on which way the wind is blowing it could work. Put a diesel electric drive and a full sized engine then use the wind turbine to see how much it could reduce fuel use. I was even having fun dreaming about the incidentals. how hard it would be to build a folding/quick assembly mechanism for the turbine to make harbor/bridge/crane access problems go away. could we duel purpose the wind turbine boom as a crane boom. Would a vertical turbine make sense?

While reading up on wind turbines I ran across the depressing story of the small ferry Hornblower Hybrid. A lot of hype on how environmentally friendly it was in 2008 when it was retrofitted with two vertical turbines. But my first though was "those turbines look awful small" and they are, the best they could do is power the lights not the boat itself. The boat itself was retro fitted in 2024 and lost it's electric drive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornblower_Hybrid

I bet even if it would work from an energy point of view, the extra complexity of the system would make it more expensive than a straight diesel ship from an operations and maintenance point of view.

The only real footage I can find is a construction video from a year ago: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DL9CSLdtkaP/

The article seemed a bit light on actually how it's been powered.

My initial assumption was that it's just going to harvest wind out of the air to power electric turbines since there's probably so much wind at the sea so much of the time.

But there's a quote in the article that says we're going with the wind, and not in a straight line.

Check of oil prices same day article was published:

WTI $73.51/bbl BRENT $77.57/bbl MURBAN: $70.46/bbl

Why is it always like this ?

"Slight improvement to be delivered in beta in a 5 years for limited users at premium prices.

Meanwhile, the latest catastrophe auto-updated 4 times while you were reading."

But whatever reduces the use of "bunker fuel" which is the most toxic vile fuel around (cruise ships use it too)

https://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2005/09/17/sa...

The company recently went bankrupt, by the way. It turns out that gigantic container ships are already incredibly efficient.