Reduction of CO2 Emissions in Ships With Advanced Energy Storage Systems

The environmental footprint of ships is on the highlights of the maritime industry to make it moves to a greener future. Recently, European regulation starts to be more severe with the monitoring, reporting and verification of CO2 emissions from large ships using that are using EU ports. The use of fossil fuels to generate power to ships is in check and the innovations in the maritime industry are making this transition. The merge between the Integrated Power Systems (IPS) with an Energy Storage System (ESS) can achieve higher generators efficiency, reducing the fuel consumption and the CO2 emission. In this article, we have performed an optimization analysis to evaluate the performance of the ship in the hybrid electric system using the software developed by NREL (National Renewable Energy Laboratories), called HOMER (Hybrid Optimization Models for Multiple Energy Resources). We have found that the reduction on emissions is very limited when the size of the generators is equal. There is a need for a better motor-generators selection.