The use of Onshore Power Supply (OPS) to replace the use of the AE will lead to significant reduction in local air pollutants and, with the use of renewable energy source, the greenhouse gases emissions can be reduced to a minimum. Nowadays ports are seldom equipped to supply vessels with electricity from the shore-side, nor are vessels usually equipped to receive power in this way. Around the world, though, many activities in this direction are now underway and interest in the technology is rapidly growing, spurred on by tougher environmental legislation, greater focus on emissions in ports from shipping, rising fuel and lower electricity cost through tax exemptions.
The novelty of our innovation business case is to use our competitive edge from a highly competitive segment in a new emerging segment. So far, the combination of high CAPEX and OPEX undermines the port’s business case in deploying OPS. However, the recent development in tax exemption gives the port and/or cruise ships an opportunity for a positive gross margin on shore side electricity. Thus, with a sufficiently high consumption and sufficiently low cost OPS, a business case will emerge. Due to the high power consumption of cruise ships, combined with our low cost OPS solution, for the first time a positive business case emerges for the cruise ship ports.
Estimates show that if all ships in European harbours would use OPS by 2020 for covering their energy demand at berth, they would consume 3,543 GWh annually, which is approximately 0.1% of the electricity consumption in Europe as a whole in 2012. Furthermore, OPS offer the potential to mitigate 800,000 tons of CO2 emissions. Cruise ships account for 38% of these numbers. Thus, the expected impact of OPS and thus of this project by making a commercial business case for ports possible, are significant and affect many stakeholders, such as the ports, cruise ship operators, municipalities, urban populations, etc.
