Massive Sails Power Ships Like Never Before

Retrofitting an existing vessel with a single wingsail can reduce fuel consumption by around 10 percent, Oceanbird says, but a ship entirely designed around these sails is far more efficient..

Thats of course not enough by any measure to meet the temperature targets that are in the Paris Agreement, says Christiaan De Beukelaer, a lecturer in Culture & Climate at the University of Melbourne and author of Trade Winds, a book about the shipping industrys climate impact...

Wind, which has powered shipping for thousands of years, can help: The physics of sailing are age-old and havent changed, but the way in which were able to do it has come a very long way because weve been able to draw lessons from all kinds of technological advancements that have happened over the past 150 years...

About 25 large, wind-powered cargo ships are already operating worldwide, with most of these technologies represented: The rotor sails have the most installations, one of the reasons being that they started to commercialize earlier than the other ones, says Gavin Allwright, secretary general of the International Windship Association, a nonprofit organization founded in 2014 that promotes wind propulsion in commercial shipping..

Among other factors that could accelerate uptake, Allwright says, are streamlining the certification process for new wind-powered ships, as well possibly higher costs of fuel, which could be impacted by new carbon taxes like the one the European Union has agreed to introduce in 2024..

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