As economic lockdowns complicate efforts to bring electricity to every corner of the planet, one company is putting generation units on ships that can sit offshore and plug into local grids at short notice.
Karpowership is busy marketing floating power plants across the developing world, where governments are seeking extra voltage to power hospitals and other facilities to keep the lights on during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Vessels can hook into an onshore grid quickly, sidestepping the red tape and construction issues involved with building a traditional power plant. The ships come with their own fuel — liquefied natural gas (LNG) and fuel oil — tapping into markets that are oversupplied.
“We can deploy them in less than 30 days,” chief commercial officer Zeynep Harezi said by telephone from her office in Istanbul, Turkey, where the ships are designed.
The generators on the ships can produce 36 to 470 megawatts of electricity and are already fully financed. While the ships use fossil fuels and present a challenge to the global drive for cleaner energy, they remain among the few solutions for feeding power to remote areas.
Such ships can work well in places with high barriers for onshore power stations or that lack access to gas pipelines, the International Gas Union said in its annual LNG report.
There are also risks: high cost and up-front capital requirements.
Also, floating power plants concepts compete with more traditional units that run on liquid fuels, renewables and nuclear power, which might receive governmental support over LNG, the report said.
“The concept of a fully integrated floating regasification and power plant may be a more realistic solution to grant easy access to clean electricity production,” the IGU said. “Such fast-track projects, built and commissioned at reputed shipyards, may materialize in the near future.”
Karpowership has the biggest fleet of the vessels. Starting from the first ship for Iraq, which took three years to build in 2010, it now operates 25 such ships in 11 countries from Mozambique to Cuba to Indonesia. Coronavirus has not slowed work, opening some opportunities for new markets.
The company converts dry bulk vessels, buys engines in bulk and builds them “one after another, almost like a production line,” Harezi said.
The technology for the power plant is internal combustion engine, rather than more typical turbines. While more expensive to build, they are cheaper to maintain and better-suited for countries in hot climates with unstable grids, which are often in desperate need for power to avoid blackouts.
As the pandemic keeps large swathes of economies on lockdown, Harezi said her teams living and working on power ships for three months or more present a “natural quarantine environment.”
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