Citizen science request – UK watercraft duty cycles survey

[Sailing steve]

So the OP has stated that this is public funded. And more importantly is planning to feed into the Governments plans on moving to nett zero. In other words, this could lead towards rules or restrictions on boating.

Good point.

Given the lack of trust in and not entirely undeserved cynicism toward official bodies and government policy making I'd not be at all surprised if there's a secondary agenda lurking just beneath the survey's surface, and that any information provided by leisure boaters is subsequently used toward the detriment of said leisure boaters with either legislation with regard to emissions control or increased taxation on fuel.

 

[footsoldier]

Let's face it no one thinks that this is serious- do they?
I think that it is actually another Amazon scam & we were all going to "win"

Sadly, I think you are wrong.

I have a horrible suspicion that it is genuine. This is the amateur, unscientific, innumerate, illiterate way that our leaders now see fit to approach their responsibilities in many areas - house-building and transport are prime, and more important examples. I would fear for the future, - but I think that nice Mr. Putin will have put us out of our misery long before this nonsense has any relevance.

 

[st599]

Obviously leisure boating will need to decarbonise, especially motor boating which piggy backs on the road industry.

But with diesel providing 45MJ/kg and LiFeO4 providing 0.5, it's not something that can easily be retrofit. In my industry, we've gone from a large heavy diesel genset, to multiple battery generators - but we don't need propulsion.

Our boats are used heavily 9 months per year, sailing on 80% of those days. They're 20 years old and with a refurb, will go on for another 20. I can't see how we could retrofit enough battery storage to safely undertake the trips we do - perhaps that means we can't go as far in future.

If decarbonisation is to occur by 2050, then boats designed to be run electrically need to enter the market soon, and even then will not be the majority by then.

 

[flaming]

Of course if looking at a 2050 timescale one has to look at "potential". However in terms of the pleasure boat market there will be minimal change in that time frame for 2 reasons. First electric is fundamentally mis matched to the way people use their boats (at least in the UK) and secondly the number of new boats (that might be electric powered) coming on is tiny in relation to the existing "park".

I can see somebody looking at all those boats sitting around doing nothing for 90%+ of the time and thinking they might provide a good back up storage of energy in their battery banks that could be charged at low demand times and accessed at high. But do some simple arithmetic and assume that all boats were converted to electric power. Our club marina has about 300 boats in the 25-40' range with inboard engines. A typical electric installation for this size has a battery capacity of between 6-10kwh, so being generous assume the higher. so the total storage is a nominal 3000kWh. This would meet the daily demand for around 300 homes or about 10500 miles of motoring in an EV. The capital cost of converting the 300 boats at an average of £15000 including the batteries would be £4.5m. I can't even guess at the infrastructure costs of hooking all these little batteries up to the grid.

Perhaps Dr Nick can now see why I suggested he needs to understand the pleasure boat scene, which was well explained in the ICOMIA report before designing his research project and questionnaire. The report was focusing on carbon reduction but the fundamental data on which it is based is essentially the same when looking at storage capacity within batteries in pleasure boats. There is mor potential in the commercial shipping field as the usage/storage numbers are far larger plus there may be possibilities for bespoke individual schemes with certain high usage operators.

I think you're slightly guilty of assuming what is today is what will be, and that the cost is necessarily a long term barrier.

For example, I think we probably all agree that a 10kWh battery isn't going to do much good mounted in a cruising boat. There's no particular reason a cruising boat couldn't have a 50kWh, or larger, battery, except at the moment that such a thing would be very expensive. As battery costs reduce, so that sort of installation becomes more viable. Battery costs, as well as performance in terms of kWh / kg are improving at a rate. By the time we get to a point where the powers that be are in a position to start legislating about diesel engines on leisure boats it's quite probable that the tech will be in a place where the alternative is financially a lot more viable. In exactly the same way that the automotive industry provided the research and development that gave us small reliable diesel engines in the first place, they're now doing the same, but massively faster, for electricity.
Then you have to consider how long diesel will continue to be readily available in the UK at prices that make its use in recreational boats viable. Already diesel passenger vehicle sales have declined to only 70k last year. Simply because the rate of scrapping diesel cars is now higher than new sales, even before the end of ICE sales demand for diesel will be considerably lower than it is now. At the point that significant number of commercial vehicles transition away from Diesel (in whatever form that takes) demand falls off a cliff, and supply starts to be an issue. When that point comes is debatable, but I don't think anyone seriously thinks it isn't coming. We are perhaps guilty of assuming that as long as we want Diesel, and it's legal, someone will sell it to us. But we forget that these are businesses, and any business leader has to look to the future. If sales of a product are diving hard, but it requires significant infrastructure and logistics to service, at some point the cost either skyrockets or you simply elect to get out. Without the built in logistics of fuel supply to retail petrol stations, what chance does our, very seasonal, leisure use have of supporting a diesel supply chain?
For that reason I'm not actually sure that the government will ever have to legislate in this area, fuel availability will do that for them...

So now we can see that whilst your conversion cost might be correct today, it is unlikely to be correct at the time in the late 2030s, or 2040s that the supply of diesel starts to dry up / become hideously expensive. Simultaneously we should remember that significant numbers of people buying boats in 20-30 years time are children now. They may well never own an ICE car. They'll never have topped up the oil in their car, and may not be keen to trust their boat to a motor type that they're not familiar with. But they'll be very familiar with EV. Ripping out an old diesel engine and replacing with a battery and electric motor will be an obvious decision for people who have grown up with that as the norm in their cars.

As to the ability to use the boats for storage, and the connection costs. That all depends on what sort of connection you want to provide. On the assumption that a 11kW connection is the maximum that's really viable to provide to every berth, then based on my commercial work install, I think you're looking at circa 2k per connection for the "end" connection, and then circa £100k per 500kW connection back to the grid. Though that figure can fluctuate wildly based on what the grid is like locally, and being remote or not is not a particular indicator of that. So a marina of 300 berths would require a 3.3mW connection and cost roughly £1m by my calculations. Or about £3k per berth. I'll accept a big margin of error on that though.
But of course it wouldn't actually need that much connection, as there's no reason to assume that every boat would be charging simultaneously, and a grid connection supporting roughly 1/3 of the boats to charge simultaneously would be more than adequate for typical leisure use. And if everyone did plug in at once they'd still charge, just at a shared power rate.

On the flip side, you wouldn't expect to provide your battery to the grid without payment. Current "grid smoothing" rates are circa £200k p/a for every mW of installed capacity, and increasing. So a 50kWh battery installed permanently should get you circa £10k p/a at current rates. However, you wouldn't get that from a boat battery in this situation for 2 reasons, firstly you're not always there, even if you are mostly there, and secondly that rate assumes a higher rate of discharge is possible. For us it is 500kW. On the flip side the battery is going to be usable by the grid for pretty much all the winter, when the demand for it will be highest. So lets assume that they'll pay £1k for this 50kW battery with an 11kW connection on an annual basis. Suddenly an install cost of £3k starts to look like an ok cost.

Of course if you have limited your "site" import/export then you'll again reduce the amount you could get for the smoothing, but you've also reduced the install cost.

In fact.... This might be a business idea.... Charter fleet of boats, make money renting them out to sail in the summer, get rapid DC connectors to the grid with the boats sat on the hard for the winter.... Reasonable setup costs but if you could pay the majority of your charter overheads from the grid smoothing fees.... hmmmmmm.

 

[jfm]

The design/drafting of the questions is really very poor. I decided not to bother completing the survey.

 

[Tranona]

I think you're slightly guilty of assuming what is today is what will be, and that the cost is necessarily a long term barrier.

For example, I think we probably all agree that a 10kWh battery isn't going to do much good mounted in a cruising boat. There's no particular reason a cruising boat couldn't have a 50kWh, or larger, battery, except at the moment that such a thing would be very expensive. As battery costs reduce, so that sort of installation becomes more viable. Battery costs, as well as performance in terms of kWh / kg are improving at a rate. By the time we get to a point where the powers that be are in a position to start legislating about diesel engines on leisure boats it's quite probable that the tech will be in a place where the alternative is financially a lot more viable. In exactly the same way that the automotive industry provided the research and development that gave us small reliable diesel engines in the first place, they're now doing the same, but massively faster, for electricity.
Then you have to consider how long diesel will continue to be readily available in the UK at prices that make its use in recreational boats viable. Already diesel passenger vehicle sales have declined to only 70k last year. Simply because the rate of scrapping diesel cars is now higher than new sales, even before the end of ICE sales demand for diesel will be considerably lower than it is now. At the point that significant number of commercial vehicles transition away from Diesel (in whatever form that takes) demand falls off a cliff, and supply starts to be an issue. When that point comes is debatable, but I don't think anyone seriously thinks it isn't coming. We are perhaps guilty of assuming that as long as we want Diesel, and it's legal, someone will sell it to us. But we forget that these are businesses, and any business leader has to look to the future. If sales of a product are diving hard, but it requires significant infrastructure and logistics to service, at some point the cost either skyrockets or you simply elect to get out. Without the built in logistics of fuel supply to retail petrol stations, what chance does our, very seasonal, leisure use have of supporting a diesel supply chain?
For that reason I'm not actually sure that the government will ever have to legislate in this area, fuel availability will do that for them...

So now we can see that whilst your conversion cost might be correct today, it is unlikely to be correct at the time in the late 2030s, or 2040s that the supply of diesel starts to dry up / become hideously expensive. Simultaneously we should remember that significant numbers of people buying boats in 20-30 years time are children now. They may well never own an ICE car. They'll never have topped up the oil in their car, and may not be keen to trust their boat to a motor type that they're not familiar with. But they'll be very familiar with EV. Ripping out an old diesel engine and replacing with a battery and electric motor will be an obvious decision for people who have grown up with that as the norm in their cars.

As to the ability to use the boats for storage, and the connection costs. That all depends on what sort of connection you want to provide. On the assumption that a 11kW connection is the maximum that's really viable to provide to every berth, then based on my commercial work install, I think you're looking at circa 2k per connection for the "end" connection, and then circa £100k per 500kW connection back to the grid. Though that figure can fluctuate wildly based on what the grid is like locally, and being remote or not is not a particular indicator of that. So a marina of 300 berths would require a 3.3mW connection and cost roughly £1m by my calculations. Or about £3k per berth. I'll accept a big margin of error on that though.
But of course it wouldn't actually need that much connection, as there's no reason to assume that every boat would be charging simultaneously, and a grid connection supporting roughly 1/3 of the boats to charge simultaneously would be more than adequate for typical leisure use. And if everyone did plug in at once they'd still charge, just at a shared power rate.

On the flip side, you wouldn't expect to provide your battery to the grid without payment. Current "grid smoothing" rates are circa £200k p/a for every mW of installed capacity, and increasing. So a 50kWh battery installed permanently should get you circa £10k p/a at current rates. However, you wouldn't get that from a boat battery in this situation for 2 reasons, firstly you're not always there, even if you are mostly there, and secondly that rate assumes a higher rate of discharge is possible. For us it is 500kW. On the flip side the battery is going to be usable by the grid for pretty much all the winter, when the demand for it will be highest. So lets assume that they'll pay £1k for this 50kW battery with an 11kW connection on an annual basis. Suddenly an install cost of £3k starts to look like an ok cost.

Of course if you have limited your "site" import/export then you'll again reduce the amount you could get for the smoothing, but you've also reduced the install cost.

In fact.... This might be a business idea.... Charter fleet of boats, make money renting them out to sail in the summer, get rapid DC connectors to the grid with the boats sat on the hard for the winter.... Reasonable setup costs but if you could pay the majority of your charter overheads from the grid smoothing fees.... hmmmmmm.

The vast majority of boats in the UK are below 12m and have a life of 50 years or over. The replacement rate (unlike cars) is tiny so adoption of electricity for propulsion on any scale will require conversion of the existing park of boats. There is no sign that this will happen, partly because there is almost no serious R&D going into this market for all the reasons given in the ICOMIA report. Pleasure boating is a discretionary activity funded out of disposable income and have we have seen people stick with it as long as they can afford it. It has survived huge increases in costs of fuel, berthing and indeed new boats and likely to survive constraints of further price and supply issues of diesels. Unlikely though that many will consider converting to electric with its high conversion costs and loss of functionality.

It is very different from the car market where over 1.5m cars are sold every year in the UK as replacements. Each new wave of development opens up new market segments - as you know even an old buffer like me can now justify buying an EV because it is an almost perfect substitute for an ICE car with my usage pattern. This is not the case with a sailing boat auxiliary and to get people to change would require enormous capital cost for both the boats and as you worked out for the infrastructure for potentially small capacity.

Anyway this is all fantasy guesswork and the only reason I introduced this was to highlight that the questionnaire is asking the wrong questions, or rather the information they are trying to get at is already well known, at least for the pleasure boat market.

 

[flaming]

The vast majority of boats in the UK are below 12m and have a life of 50 years or over. The replacement rate (unlike cars) is tiny so adoption of electricity for propulsion on any scale will require conversion of the existing park of boats. There is no sign that this will happen, partly because there is almost no serious R&D going into this market for all the reasons given in the ICOMIA report. Pleasure boating is a discretionary activity funded out of disposable income and have we have seen people stick with it as long as they can afford it. It has survived huge increases in costs of fuel, berthing and indeed new boats and likely to survive constraints of further price and supply issues of diesels. Unlikely though that many will consider converting to electric with its high conversion costs and loss of functionality.

It is very different from the car market where over 1.5m cars are sold every year in the UK as replacements. Each new wave of development opens up new market segments - as you know even an old buffer like me can now justify buying an EV because it is an almost perfect substitute for an ICE car with my usage pattern. This is not the case with a sailing boat auxiliary and to get people to change would require enormous capital cost for both the boats and as you worked out for the infrastructure for potentially small capacity.

Anyway this is all fantasy guesswork and the only reason I introduced this was to highlight that the questionnaire is asking the wrong questions, or rather the information they are trying to get at is already well known, at least for the pleasure boat market.

And I think that the bit you're missing is that you're looking at it from your perspective, where you've grown up with ICE engines and understand them.

Boat buyers, even of older boats, in the decades to come will largely not be at all familiar with ICE engines. Replacing the engine of a 40 year old fiberglass boat with an electric one makes sense to someone who's never operated a Diesel engine before but is very familiar with EV. Especially when you consider that with the demise of new ICE engines we are also going to have a dwindling supply of service engineers etc for those ICE engines. Add in increasing fuel costs and decreasing conversion costs.....

And I'd echo my point that the ICOMIA report, good though it is, is a snapshot in time, and does not see how transferable a lot of the current automotive research into battery tech will be.

 

[Sailing steve]

Sadly, I think you are wrong.

I have a horrible suspicion that it is genuine. This is the amateur, unscientific, innumerate, illiterate way that our leaders now see fit to approach their responsibilities in many areas - house-building and transport are prime, and more important examples. I would fear for the future, - but I think that nice Mr. Putin will have put us out of our misery long before this nonsense has any relevance.

Indeed.

It's classic Facebook mentality, and it's also a sad reflection of our quality of leadership that's incapable of recognising the difference in validity between detailed objective analysis of complex issues by people well qualified to do so and the subjective vacuous brain-dead chatter on social media by celebrity worshipping idiots.

When serious enquiry is bought that low I very much fear for the future too...

 

[SaltyC]

I have just attempted to complete the survey, as others have said ALL the questions are directed at commercial vessels, not leisure vessels.
Any answers I give can be misleading. How many hours is an 'average 'day? It varies from 3 to 4 to 18, yet wind permitting both scenarios could only have 1 to 2 hours of engine use. BUT we also understand a sailing boat is as much use as a wind turbine in flat calm and hence the iron topsail is put to use and engine hours equal total hours.
I can also be off grid for 10 days in remote anchorages.
For the data to be relevant to leisure users, the questions need to be written with an understanding of the usage pattern of said vessels.
It is worrying that generalised data may be used to direct future policy.
After completing I realised answers were at best misleading at worst could be twisted to give answers they wanted so did not submit. AIS Data can say where I was and time at sea but doesn't give engine hours fir a sailing boat.

 

[stranded]

The vast majority of boats in the UK are below 12m and have a life of 50 years or over. The replacement rate (unlike cars) is tiny so adoption of electricity for propulsion on any scale will require conversion of the existing park of boats. There is no sign that this will happen, partly because there is almost no serious R&D going into this market for all the reasons given in the ICOMIA report. Pleasure boating is a discretionary activity funded out of disposable income and have we have seen people stick with it as long as they can afford it. It has survived huge increases in costs of fuel, berthing and indeed new boats and likely to survive constraints of further price and supply issues of diesels. Unlikely though that many will consider converting to electric with its high conversion costs and loss of functionality.

It is very different from the car market where over 1.5m cars are sold every year in the UK as replacements. Each new wave of development opens up new market segments - as you know even an old buffer like me can now justify buying an EV because it is an almost perfect substitute for an ICE car with my usage pattern. This is not the case with a sailing boat auxiliary and to get people to change would require enormous capital cost for both the boats and as you worked out for the infrastructure for potentially small capacity.

Anyway this is all fantasy guesswork and the only reason I introduced this was to highlight that the questionnaire is asking the wrong questions, or rather the information they are trying to get at is already well known, at least for the pleasure boat market.

I suspect that the rather more uncomfortable point is that in the foreseeable future the shift to electric will not be at the discretion of leisure boaters - society simply will not, for big fast motorboats in particular, allow the continuing use of frankly obscene quantities of fossil fuels at a time when everyone else is going to need to be adapting, not always enthusiastically, to EVs, heat pumps, ruinous carbon taxes on flights etc. etc. And when they do it’s going to be hard to carve out an exception for more modestly powered leisure vessels which would be much less expensive to convert.

Economics will play its part too - but it needn’t be the price of electric conversion dropping dramatically - enforced boat sales by people unable or unwilling to bear the cost of conversion will bring the prices of ICE boats down to the point where they again make sense to buyers. An upside might be that there will need to be organised disposal facilities for the very many boats that simply won’t be worth converting if harbours are not to be completely clogged by abandoned boats.

 

[Tranona]

And I think that the bit you're missing is that you're looking at it from your perspective, where you've grown up with ICE engines and understand them.

Boat buyers, even of older boats, in the decades to come will largely not be at all familiar with ICE engines. Replacing the engine of a 40 year old fiberglass boat with an electric one makes sense to someone who's never operated a Diesel engine before but is very familiar with EV. Especially when you consider that with the demise of new ICE engines we are also going to have a dwindling supply of service engineers etc for those ICE engines. Add in increasing fuel costs and decreasing conversion costs.....

And I'd echo my point that the ICOMIA report, good though it is, is a snapshot in time, and does not see how transferable a lot of the current automotive research into battery tech will be.

It is irrelevant whether I have grown up with ICE - I have an electric car.

Equally the comparison with road transport and pleasure boating is false. The only connection is that pleasure boats are mostly powered by motors that are by products of automotive and industrial power technology. The developments in automotive power are diverging from the needs of boats and there does not seem to be anything transferrable to boats. Equally there is minimal development in electrics for industrial and agricultural use that might have applications in boats. There are no concrete "targets" to force these sectors down the electric route so I really do not see a fall off in supply of diesels for boats. It has taken 15 years and billions to develop electric for cars to the point where 30% of buyers are prepared to buy one - and this only in the rich parts of the world aided in part by massive state subsidy. This is just not going to happen in the boating world even in the 25 years up to 2050.

I don't buy the arguments that "new" consumers will be more likely to accept electric in their boats. There is nothing about electric in boats that is "better" apart from the reduction in noise which people like until they see the cost of conversion. There may well be a slow trickle in the high end new boat market. This has been around for years - electric was being shown as feasible technically over 20 years ago but even today it is still fringe. It is not just the battery technology that is the barrier, but the motor and transmission for powering boats, particularly existing ones that will be the barrier.

 

[capnsensible]

Drifting a little, in Marina Rubicon and in Playa Blanca Marina in Lanzarote, there are thriving businesses renting out small electric powered boats. Up to 8, pay by the hour.

No licence required!

 

[Dellquay13]

And I think that the bit you're missing is that you're looking at it from your perspective, where you've grown up with ICE engines and understand them.

Boat buyers, even of older boats, in the decades to come will largely not be at all familiar with ICE engines. Replacing the engine of a 40 year old fiberglass boat with an electric one makes sense to someone who's never operated a Diesel engine before but is very familiar with EV. Especially when you consider that with the demise of new ICE engines we are also going to have a dwindling supply of service engineers etc for those ICE engines. Add in increasing fuel costs and decreasing conversion costs.....

And I'd echo my point that the ICOMIA report, good though it is, is a snapshot in time, and does not see how transferable a lot of the current automotive research into battery tech will be.

“Boat buyers, even of older boats, in the decades to come will largely not be at all familiar with ICE engines.”

I decided that I wanted to move away from motorboats mostly because I didn’t like the way I easily burned my way through about 100litres of unleaded in a weekend with a 70hp outboard. It was a conscious decision based mostly on moving away from carbon dioxide emissions.

I chose to buy a small yacht with a little diesel inboard, but times have changed in the centuries since the technology was developed and I quickly found that I had to learn a lot of old fashioned knowhow and skills to get the boat to move by sailpower, because I had spent 25 years immersed in modern ICE power.

 

[jac]

There's a massive hole in the questions for me. "Is your boat permanently moored and connected to Electricity"
I could have the biggest Solar and Lithium Battery bank on board, be paid a fee for usage and be guaranteed 100% charge when I want the boat but there is no point when I'm permanently moored mid river. Even the " Do you go into port overnight?" makes an assumption that Shore Power is an option.

 

[Egret]

Might we see some suitable motor boats fitted with keels and sails to extend their lives and potential cruising distance - as electric motors are dependant on charging points being available and relatively closely spaced. Solar OK for ancilliary electricity but probably wouldn't be enough to power an engine for long. Not sure how you would do the direct Brest to Coruna mentioned in another thread in an electric motorboat.

 

[Bilgediver]

So, electric boats connected to smart meters are being considered as a viable battery backup to the National Grid?

[holds head in hands] Is this a whole new level in clutching at straws?

While China and India carry on mining and consuming coal in vast quantities. ??

 

[st599]

While China and India carry on mining and consuming coal in vast quantities. ??

China is decarbonising at the same rate as the UK and India is on target to be net zero 10 years after us.

The UK Blue Carbon Reports show 30% of the UK's seas being used to store carbon - that's most shallow bays in the UK. The reports also state that anchoring would release the stored carbon.

 

[neil_s]

Checking back over my fuel bills I find that I re-fill my 50 litre diesel tank every other year. I also have a swinging mooring. I filled in the survey!

 

[capnsensible]

Looks like manufacturers are upping their game with eco. This is a link to Sunreef. Very expensive and no doubt the usual suspects will go urgh but its developing. Good as far as I'm concerned!

80 Sunreef Power ECO Sól

 

[DJE]

The UK Blue Carbon Reports show 30% of the UK's seas being used to store carbon - that's most shallow bays in the UK. The reports also state that anchoring would release the stored carbon.

So the carbon is safely stored in perpetuity but it can be released by a yacht anchor? Anybody else find that hard to believe?