Man, I hate being “greeted” by popovers.
meh…this is just reprinting their press release: https://www.neoline.eu/en/neoliner-origin-70-fuel-savings-and-a-first-year-confirming-the-industrial-potential-of-wind-powered-shipping/
it sucks, because it’d be great if it was more feasible, but anytime you see news about wind-powered cargo ships a “this is greenwashing” alarm should go off in your head
that 70% number in the headline sounds really promising, right?
The 136 metre roll on roll off vessel, which entered service in October 2025, completed nine commercial round trips, sailed more than 62,000 nautical miles and transported 12,063 tonnes of cargo during its first year.
one ship, 9 trips, 12,000 tons of cargo
meanwhile, Panamax carries ~50,000 tons, and neo-Panamax carries ~120,000 tons. in one trip.
so you build 10 of these ships, sail them for a year, and it replaces one trip by one neo-Panamax ship.
except, it doesn’t even really do that. the press release talks about the ship being “roll-on / roll-off” like it’s a feature. which it can be, for certain niches.
but modern cargo ships all use big stacks of shipping containers, and handle them at ports using giant overhead cranes. that’s effectively the worldwide standard.
and ships with huge sailing masts are either impossible or very difficult to make work with those overhead cranes. so this isn’t just a question of building new wind-powered cargo ships, it’s also retrofitting every existing cargo port in the world to handle them.
is all of that technically possible? sure.
but we have 12 years to prevent a climate change catastrophe…according to a report published 8 years ago. “check it out guys, we built one sailboat” just ain’t gonna cut it.
I dunno, I’m often close to a shipping port and see roll-on/roll-off ships all the time. And if I see them, you can bet there’s a lot more there I’m missing. Haha.
I’m not really a shipping professional or nerd, but are we maybe comparing apples to oranges here? “Look, this orange is incredibly hard, tastes sour and has no pith or juice.” Yeah, it’s a pretty good apple though.
They may be greenwashing, but we should also be producing and consuming locally a lot more, so a future focused on smaller efficient ships might be a good thing. Or just alternatives for the industries that can use them.
but modern cargo ships all use big stacks of shipping containers, and handle them at ports using giant overhead cranes. that’s effectively the worldwide standard.
and ships with huge sailing masts are either impossible or very difficult to make work with those overhead cranes.
The masts fold
that looks to me like they fold in order to meet some height restriction to fit under a bridge or something, not in order to unload cargo?
this is the setup I’m talking about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container_ship#%2Fmedia%2FFile%3AMAERSK_MC_KINNEY_MÖLLER_=&_MARSEILLE_MAERSK_(48694054418).jpg=
and you can see from the way the top deck is built, with or without the folding masts, that this ship is not designed to be unloaded like that.
Awesome stuff! I was sceptical about this venture, so it’s really great to see it come off. Anyone know the expected cost or scalability? 70% could relate to like $50,000 per day fuel cost reduction!
Scalability? These are 136 meters long, they are already being used at physical scale and their cost savings makes scaling in terms of how many sails are built a straightforward process.
136m is relatively short for a transatlantic ship… these days conventional ships are up to 400m long.
True but at a longer hull length you just add more sails, the limitation would be sail area per unit of hull length, not some absolute limit to how big you can go in total sail area.
So is this actually cheaper than using a large diesel-only cargo ship? Since the ship is probably smaller, and apparently can’t be loaded from the top like traditional cargo ships.
The 136 metre roll on roll off vessel
…
Neoliner Origin carried 1,845 freight units, representing 55,889 cubic metres of cargo, including vehicles, containers, oversized industrial equipment, machinery and refrigerated goods.
