Adrian:
Two new electric two new electric ferries will soon be up and running in Auckland, New Zealand, designed and engineered by EV Maritime. With a launch date of 2024, the goal of the electric ferries is to provide a ferry service that is zero emissions, clean, quiet, reliable and substantially cheaper to operate. For insights into this project. Today I’m talking with Michael Eaglin, co-founder and chief executive of EV Maritime.
(Slightly Abridged)
Hello Michael!
Michael Eaglen / EV Maritime:
Yeah, hi, how are you going?
Adrian:
Good, thank you
Michael Eaglen / EV Maritime:
Nice to talk to you.
Adrian:
I’ve been following everything in the media. And you seem to be quite active…
Michael Eaglen / EV Maritime:
Yes, we have been pretty active here in New Zealand and across the ditch in Australia as well and increasingly over in the States and Canada. But yeah, it’s all going in our little world.
Adrian:
Maybe you could just start with an overview of EV Maritime, just to give an idea of what you are actually doing?
Michael Eaglen / EV Maritime:
We’re a design technology and engineering company based in Auckland, developing solutions to decarbonize, what we say, decarbonize the harbor cities of the world. For us, that’s primarily about ferries or it starts with ferries. And so we, probably around about 2018, started developing an electric fast ferry, picking up really on the… the electrification trends going on, sort of driven mostly out of Scandinavia in this big heavy car ferries and going, gosh, I wonder if we could make that work for fast ferries.
And one thing led to another, and we invested a whole lot of time and money in developing a boat. And now we’ve got two of them built for Auckland Transport. So, it’s been quite a journey. But yeah, so design, technology, system integration, ferry system design. all around how to decarbonize ferries in our cities.
Adrian:
Yep. And what can just a few details about the actual ferries that are going to be in Auckland for a start.
Michael Eaglen / EV Maritime:
Sure, yeah, well we’re doing the first two electric ferries for Auckland, which is really exciting. They’re 24 meters long, about 80 feet. Catamaran means they’ve got two hulls, which is the general format of most of the ferries in Auckland now. They carry 200 passengers. They’re made of carbon fiber, so this is all about maximizing their efficiency, it’s about reducing their weight and using hull shapes which are slippery, if you like.
And they’re battery electric. So, they’ve got about 1.2 megawatt hours of batteries on board, split between two sides, two battery rooms, one in each hull. They’re running Hamilton jet propulsion with permanent magnet electric motors, so two jets per hull, four jets total, and a whole raft, of course, of power electronics and then PLC-driven switchboards and so on to run an efficient and reliable boat.
EV Maritime’s EVM200 design
Adrian:
How long does that take to build?
Michael Eaglen / EV Maritime:
Well, these first ones involve building a whole lot of tooling as well as the construction of the vessels. So, these first ones, the contracts were signed in the end of March 2022, right when we were all in the midst of trying to work out how to get product around the world because of
Adrian:
Yeah.
Michael Eaglen / EV Maritime:
COVID and so on. So, there was a bit of material delay. So those will be just over two years to build these two boats, two and a half, I guess, to finish. But… going forward probably about a year and a half to build a boat.
Adrian:
Oh yeah.
Michael Eaglen / EV Maritime:
And you can build multiple at once, of course, and overlap the build process.
Adrian:
Oh yeah, and how do they, um, just on the water, what’s the performance compared to the current fairies?
Michael Eaglen / EV Maritime:
So, they can do the same speed as the current ferries. So, they do 25 knots, which for people who aren’t involved in boats, it’s about 50 kilometers an hour. Which doesn’t sound like a lot, but there’s a very large amount of energy involved in making a boat go that fast. And if you look in Auckland, the ferry journey is typically around about half the distance of what it would be by road.
So, although you’re not going as fast, you’re going half as far. So, it still produces… public transport journeys which are around about the same time or quicker than what it would be driving by road and of course you don’t have to pay for parking at the other end so it’s pretty attractive.
Adrian:
What about the wake? Is it better?
Michael Eaglen / EV Maritime:
Yeah, a little bit. It’s quite a lot of work’s gone into reducing wake on ferries over the last few decades.
Adrian:
Yep.
Michael Eaglen / EV Maritime:
So, they’re not too bad now. And the biggest thing you can do to reduce wake is reduce the weight of the boats.
Adrian:
Yeah.
Michael Eaglen / EV Maritime:
And there’s a limit to how much you can reduce that on electric boats.
But the other thing you can do is you can optimize the hull shape. And there’s a lot of one of the nice thing that, well, one of the, I guess. Because there’s a real incentive to optimize the hull shape to reduce resistance anyway in order to make a good electric boat that needs to be efficient. And wave making, of course, all of that wake is made out of energy.
So, if you can make less wash, you can use less energy. So yes, the weight minimization is a really large part of making an efficient boat and a really big part of the hull shape optimization that we’ve gone through. And that’s really also partly enabled by using composite materials which enables the hull shapes to be more complex than they would be able to be if they were aluminum.
EVM200-commuter
Adrian:
Mm-hmm and just on the but what’s the difference between if you’re the will say the captain. What are you gonna experience difference?
Michael Eaglen / EV Maritime:
Well to start with it’s quiet, really quiet, so that’s the biggest thing. The boats overall will end up being around about the same weight that they are now, same kind of passenger capacity, same kind of length, so they’ll behave much like the existing boats from a sea kindliness and sea worthiness perspective. They will have about the same amount of power.
Because they’ve got electric motors, they’ve got a bit more torque. upfront. That doesn’t really translate into blistering acceleration the way it does in a car.
Adrian:
in a car, yeah.
Michael Eaglen / EV Maritime:
I guess the analogy is with a car, if you’ve got too much power, too much torque, you spin your wheels. It’s
Adrian:
Yeah.
Michael Eaglen / EV Maritime:
a little bit the same with boats. But they’ll be a little bit snappier in that sense. But much quieter and much more intelligent. So, there’s a lot more data, a lot more information. a lot more connectivity. So, the boats will be connected in real time to the shore. There’s a lot of information being beamed back to shore about the status of all of the systems and a lot of information coming back to the captain about not only where you are and how fast you’re going, but things like how much battery should you have left when you arrive, a little bit like Google Maps.
Google Maps says you should arrive at 6.22 in the evening. This will say, based on the Root model, when you arrive, you’ll probably have around about 62% battery, that kind of thing.
How do you actually charge the battery? How’s that… how’s that work?
Michael Eaglen / EV Maritime:
Yeah, a really, really big charger. So, for people who are into that,
Adrian:
Big cable
Michael Eaglen / EV Maritime:
these
Adrian:
out
Michael Eaglen / EV Maritime:
are pretty
Adrian:
there.
Michael Eaglen / EV Maritime:
exciting. Yeah, pretty much. So, we’re using the new MCS standard, so Megawatt Charging Standard, which is just in the throes of being rolled out by Charon at the moment internationally. That can do really high current. So, we’re talking two plugs, and in our case, taking a megawatt per plug. So yeah, it’s pretty big gear, two-megawatt charging. It’s kind of around 10 times the speed of a decent fast charger. So yeah, it’s quite big gear.
It’s a big project in itself rolling that out.
Adrian:
Yeah, so do you do a trip and then do a bit of charge and then back to a bit of charge or is it
Michael Eaglen / EV Maritime:
You do. You do because, but one of the things with ferries, of course, is they come and go from the same docks
and they stop and they charge, sorry, when they stop, they stop for a period of time alongside while they’re loading and unloading passengers. And so that’s time that you can use recharging.
And if you can just capture those little periods of time, they might only be four or five minutes each time, then sometimes that’s even enough to keep up with the schedule through the day. or it buys you enough time to take a longer charge when the schedule allows. So those charging periods are really, even though they might seem really short, four or five minutes, they’re really valuable for enabling you to maintain a full electric service all through the day.
Adrian:
And what are the batteries made out of?
Michael Eaglen / EV Maritime:
So, these are lithium ion batteries,
So, it’s NMC chemistry. So very focused on weight efficiency and weight more than volumetric, but it’s sort of mass density and mass energy density is really important to us. So, we’re talking around about 12 tons of batteries in each boat. And that’s quite a lot on a boat that’s only. 75 tonnes when it’s full of people, that 10 or 12 tonnes is a significant portion of the total weight.
Adrian:
Yeah, yeah. And is Auckland Transport actually going to be the owner? Is that right?
Michael Eaglen / EV Maritime:
Yes. That’s unusual too and that’s a transition that’s happening in the Auckland ferry service at the moment. Traditionally the vessels have been owned by the operators and then operated under contract to AT and AT is in a process at the moment of transitioning that model towards a new model where they will own the assets and then contract, they’ll lease them to the operators to deliver the services.
How many other fairies are there?
Michael Eaglen / EV Maritime:
30 ferries in the Auckland fleet at the moment. And so, yeah, AT owns, I think, about five of them at the moment of just existing diesel boats.
And then they’ll have gradually build that fleet up over time until they, I guess, own all of them. I guess.
Adrian:
Oh yeah, so they could be going out to Waiheke?
Michael Eaglen / EV Maritime:
Well at the moment Auckland Transport’s focus is on the, if you like, the mainland routes. Waiheke is still run privately by Fullers.
That’s not part of this picture.
We’re about those kind of core, if you like, commuter services. Of course, the Waiheke ferry is also a really important piece of the open ferry network and a really large emitter and a great opportunity for electrification as well. But that’s not, I guess, what this first stage is about.
Michael Eaglen / EV Maritime:
We’ve been, I guess we’ve put a lot of time and effort into Sydney helping to paint a picture of what the electrification pathway might look like for Sydney’s ferries. Sydney’s got a very, very well respected and world famous ferry service which delivers a great commuter service to Sydney’s riders but It’s pretty high emissions, they all run on diesel.
And it’s fair to say they’re a fair way behind Auckland Transport at this point in their thinking about decarbonisation. They’ve just ordered seven new diesel ferries for the Parramatta River, which we were promoting that procurement as an opportunity to step into electrification. If not… That we’re not sure what the next opportunity is, but certainly we’re working hard to shine a light on the opportunity for electrification, because the whole of that ferry service could be electrified with current technology now. And when it can be, it should be, because the emissions from ferries are really high.
We’re still doing the numbers on the Sydney service, but certainly on the Auckland ferry service. There’s 13 million litres of diesel being burned in the Auckland ferry fleet every year. There’s only 30 boats and there’s around about 1400 buses and yet the boats consume about half the diesel of the whole bus fleet. So, it’s a pretty significant piece of the emissions pie. And I think in Auckland… Ferries represent about three times their fair share of emissions in terms of the share of services delivered versus their share of emissions.
20% of Auckland’s public transport emissions come from ferries, when only about 6% of the journeys are delivered by ferries.
So, it’s a pretty big problem.
Adrian:
Is it a bit of a hard self, say, electric based, because sort of cars are now sort of everyone sort of jumping on the bandwagon a bit of getting electric cars for their fleets and everything? Boat’s a little bit further behind?
Michael Eaglen / EV Maritime:
Yeah, boats are a little bit further behind. I guess it’s been easy with cars. Well, no, gosh, that’s unkind. The guys that are pushing electrification for cars have worked very, very hard to get where they are now, and that wasn’t easy either.
With cars, I guess you have more standardization, and so people can go out and buy an electric car, and they see… they know what that car is going to do, that it doesn’t feel like a big risk. And at the moment with ferries, with boats, generally everything is custom. And so, everything is kind of like you’re inventing it from scratch off a blank sheet of paper.
And that feels like an awfully high risk way of approaching a project when you’re on the customer end. And that’s one of the things that EV Maritime is very focused on addressing in the way we have we actually offer platform standardization. So, we’re working, for example, with a shipyard in Brisbane at the moment, who has come to us and said, we really want to look at electrifying the rivers, the CityCat ferries on the Brisbane River.
And so, we’ve said, OK, well, we’ve got a platform that’s perfect for that. We’ve done the analysis. It works really well. It can go along the river. It can do the speed. It can meet the criteria. How about you work with that platform, design for yourselves what you want it to be like in terms of the look and feel and how the seats are laid out and where the windows are and all that stuff, but build that on the platform that’s already been validated in New Zealand and which, by this time next year, will be proven in New Zealand.
So, it gives a much lower cost pathway into electrification, but also a much higher confidence pathway, because you can buy into something which is proven, and you can make your own adaptations. And I guess it’s a little bit like the people who build camper vans using a truck chassis. You know,
Adrian:
Right.
Michael Eaglen / EV Maritime:
you’ve got an underlying platform that you’re working with, you don’t have to completely reinvent the whole wheel. You can just take that flatbed. truck chassis and put your caravan on the back of it and turn it into a campervan. And that model works quite well. So that’s, I guess, sort of an analogy of what we’re doing there. And that’s certainly helping the adoption of electrification.
But I think that it’s not only, I think with the cars, most of the challenge has been around getting comfortable with the vehicle. With the buses, we’re seeing that transition across to being where the difficulty in adoption is more coming from the infrastructure. People can see the bus, they can see it can do the job, they’re worried about how much damage it does to the roads because it’s heavy, and they’re worried about how they get that much power to the bus terminal.
And we’re a little bit the same with the boats. The boats, we’re not worried about wearing out the roads, of course, but we’ll… we’ve got an even bigger challenge getting the power to the docks. And so I was saying to somebody this morning that the boats are technically quite challenging but politically quite straightforward, whereas the charging infrastructure is technically really quite straightforward. But um…
politically quite challenging because there’s a lot of parties involved and you’ve got to convince the power company to provide enough power to you at the place where you need it, you’ve got to get all the consents you need, you’ve got to get all the various parties with an interest in the way the land is used to all align and converge around a common solution and you need to do that in a reasonably short period of time so we can meet our decarbonisation goals. problems, the technical aspects of delivering that charging infrastructure are quite trivial compared to those political and commercial ones.
Adrian:
Yeah, because government sort of supporting it, isn’t it?
Michael Eaglen / EV Maritime:
Absolutely.
Michael Eaglen / EV Maritime:
Look, central government’s been a huge supporter of this project. We were very fortunate to have central government support through the shovel-ready infrastructure program around COVID time. And ultimately, $27 million of central government funding was awarded through EECA, the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority, under the, you know, through funding basically from Crown infrastructure partners. which was awarded to Auckland Transport to enable them to go down this path.
So that’s a very important part of this project. And we see that around the world. The places which are able to get on with these things are those where there is some central government funding to catalyse action. And the places where they’re struggling to get things off the ground is where… the agencies or even worse, just private operators themselves, are kind of left to drive it through just private sector investment because the payback periods are there.
There is a return that, yes, they’re more expensive to buy, but they’re cheaper to operate and it does stack up, but it’s not a get rich quick scheme.
With all of the difficulties of doing it, it’s not. yet at the point where businesses are going to do it just to directly provide a great ROI to their shareholders. There’s got to be more to it than that. That government funding that comes, that’s come to our project and similar projects around New Zealand and around the world is really, really important to those things actually getting off the ground.
Adrian:
So say in 10 years, do you think it’s going to be a much bigger uptake? A lot more literature boats floating around the world.
Michael Eaglen / EV Maritime:
Oh yeah, totally. I mean, within New Zealand, I mean, I think if you look at the transport emissions reduction plan in Auckland, I think they’re saying that 75% of the fleet needs to be zero or low emission by 2030.
So that’s a lot of boats just locally 2030, pretty soon.
And then if we look, we’ve got a bit of an involvement with a project up in San Francisco, which is rolling out electric ferries. We’re going to start seeing it happen quite quickly now. And particularly, I mean, the Auckland project’s quite important globally. It’s one of the first large-scale, high-frequency, kind of core commuter-type services to electrify around the world in the fast ferry scene. And so, we’ve got this one here. There’s another project that’s kind of similar in Stockholm that’s got another Kiwi company involved.
And between those two projects and one or two other little outliers here and there, you’ve got all at the same time really quite a step change happening. And all eyes are on Auckland and a couple of other spots around the world about watching how this is done, watching us as we go through those early kind of no doubt teething problems that we have when these things first happen and seeing that roll out. and there’s a lot of people lining up to apply the same thing in their cities.
Adrian:
So, can you say Auckland sort of, or New Zealand becomes sort of that centre of excellence, like the yachting with the America’s Cup and everything?
Michael Eaglen / EV Maritime:
Yeah, and it’s interesting, it’s exactly what’s happening. And when we first started on this journey, it came about because we were looking, I was running a boat yard at the time, and looking at what was the next opportunity for New Zealand to have a place in the world in marine. We had a big one in yachting, had a big one in super yachts. Those things were kind of fading away a little bit. no disrespect at all to Team New Zealand, who of course are still leading the world in their own field, and there’s a few other leaders as well.
But in terms of the scale of the market, New Zealand really dropped away there. And this totally is a massive opportunity. It plays so well to the strengths of the New Zealand marine industry, the innovation, the performance expertise, the kind of, the insistence on finding a better way to do things rather than just… carrying on doing things the same way, very much a kind of a future focus. We’re never looking to just make money out of the current project. We’re always looking to say, well, no, how do we focus on the next project?
How do we push that edge further out? And so I really think that this is a big opportunity for New Zealand. And there’s a number of other players in New Zealand who are really getting active in this as well, and not necessarily in exactly the same area. There’s people who are looking at foiling boats, typically smaller ones. There’s people looking at electric outboard motors, also electric jet dinghies, all sorts of stuff. So, there’s definitely quite a growing movement within New Zealand on that sort of sustainable, clean energy marine industry.
Adrian:
Yeah, is there anything else you wanted to… key points you wanted to cover off?
Michael Eaglen / EV Maritime:
I guess one of our messages really is, you know, for Kiwis to really believe in the New Zealand industry and our ability to make a mark in the world. It’s a really exciting place to be. I’ve been in the marine industry now for, you know, I guess going on through decades. This feels like an opportunity to really deploy all of that knowledge and experience into something that’s really meaningful. And New Zealand really is leading the way, not only in the technology side, but with partners like Auckland Transport enrolling out the infrastructure, and of course the bravery of the government to get in and support this kind of stuff at an early stage and catalyze things happening, has really put New Zealand and Auckland in particular on the world stage on this.
So now I think that’s something to really celebrate. And I can’t really tell you about all the stuff that’s happening overseas and all the attention we’re really getting from it, but I can tell you there’s a lot of attention. And so I think that there’s a really bright future for it.
And it should give some young people something really exciting to get interested again in joining the marine industry and their careers. And yeah, I think it’s… I think it’s really important. I think there’s one other piece possibly which is particularly relevant in Auckland where ferries are a fairly large part of our public transport system.
It’s really to encourage people to take public transport when they can. Public transport is there, we all spend a lot of money, a lot of our ratepayers and taxpayers’ money goes into public transport. I used to drive to work all the time and when we moved our office into the city I… started catching the bus and the ferry to work and gosh I hate driving when I have to now. Public transport is just so much better so I encourage everyone to give it a go because it really is better.
Adrian:
Well Auckland and driving don’t really go together so…
Michael Eaglen / EV Maritime:
No, that’s right. Well, nobody likes getting stuck in the Southern car park. So,
Adrian:
No.
Michael Eaglen / EV Maritime:
but no, look, it’s, I mean, in my commute, I catch the bus to get to the ferry and then, and I sit on the ferry for about 40 minutes each way to and from work. I sit there with a table with a laptop out. That’s fully productive time. It’s very hard to do that when you’re driving. It’s actually even quite hard to do that when you’re on the bus or the train.
So, ferries really do represent a great mode of public transport. You make friends, you get some work done, enjoy the view, and you get cars off the roads.
Adrian:
Hybrids, how do they fit in?
Michael Eaglen / EV Maritime:
Well, hybrids have a place, not necessarily the same place that everybody thinks they do. A hybrid can. Effectively, if you can make it zero emission, you should. The problem with a hybrid is you put a whole lot more weight in. So, your hybrid will always use more energy than a pure electric boat, because it’s actually going to be heavier.
And so, you’ve got to be careful to start with to make sure that you’re building a hybrid which is actually lower emission than a good. modern diesel boat because it won’t necessarily always be.
There are a couple of hybrids happening for Auckland and they potentially make some sense. They’re gonna be able to run as a full electric boat on a plug-in hybrid basis between Auckland and Devonport, which is a very highly heavily used service, but very slow and low speed short distance, so it doesn’t use much energy. So that will be able to be electrified, and that’s kind of nice.
And the hybrid gives them the ability to go off and do other things with that boat at other times if they need to. But on most of what we’re focused on, the hybrid doesn’t really make any sense, doesn’t really help, and it’s not really low emission. So, I think that we have a bit of a perception.
There’s a lot of people who like to, we’ve seen this around the world, there’s people building self-charging hybrids for example, so they don’t plug into the dock at all. And in general, they’re going to actually produce more greenhouse gas emissions than the diesel boats that they replace. So, we’re very opposed to those.
Plug-in hybrids don’t have to be that bad, but they’re very complex. There’s a lot of systems, you’ve got all of that electrical stuff and you’ve got all of the diesel stuff. So… Yeah, it needs a really good analysis of what their real emissions are to make sure that they’re the right thing. There are definitely places where they would fit, particularly in the short term. I think we’re going to find that hydrogen replaces them quite quickly.
In the places where you can’t run full electric, you’ll find yourself running hydrogen instead. Because I think that we’ll find that the emissions from… hybrid boats are still unjustifiably high. And so, yeah, I guess that’s Hybrids are complicated.
Adrian:
OK, maybe just a final thing for the commuters to look forward to. What’s the, what are they going to experience when they first walk on the boat?
Michael Eaglen / EV Maritime:
Well, I mean, it’s these boats are going to be quite different in a certain way. I mean, these are that we’ve really, if you like, pushed the boat out from an interior design perspective. We’ve really made the boats focused on making them a really pleasant and enjoyable place to be rather than just a just a bus on water.
Adrian:
Yeah.
Michael Eaglen / EV Maritime:
And lots of lots of light, lots of windows, lots of glass. fully enclosed on the main deck which is unusual so that means that their bicycles will be stored inside not outside on the back deck so you can bring a decent bike along and put it in the proper rack and not have to have it sort of come off all wet and salty at the end of the trip. Much more accessible for people with wheelchairs and push chairs and so on so we’ve worked really hard to make sure that the best seats on the boat go to those who have the greatest… mobility issues and so on. So that’s rather than just kind of making those mobility seats an afterthought, we’ve really made them so central to the design.
And yeah, we’re going to gradually be releasing a few images over the next few months of the interiors. So yeah, watch the space. But yeah, other than that, lovely and quiet, no diesel fumes, much more reliable. All the things you need really.
Adrian: Oh, that’s great. That’s great. Thanks,