From Norway to New York, electric ferries are taking over the globe

Coming this fall, residents in Stockholm won’t have to endure the hour-long commute by car or train between Ekerö, a popular suburb, and central Stockholm, home to the historic City Hall.

Instead, they can jump on a 30-passenger ferry and make the journey in half the time, all while helping to cut down on carbon dioxide emissions.

This isn’t your run-of-the-mill diesel ferry. It’s the P-12, an electric ferry that hovers just above the surface of the water, like a landspeeder straight out of “Star Wars.”

Created by Candela, a Swedish company that’s been finetuning the technology since 2016, the P-12 uses a hydrofoil to lift the boat above the water’s surface, reducing drag and the amount of energy needed to operate it. “The hydrofoil system cuts energy consumption by 80% compared to fossil fuel-powered vessels,” says Gustav Hemming, vice president of the Regional Executive Board in Stockholm who is responsible for sea-bound public transport. “That number is obviously huge, and a game-changer for waterborne transport.”

It’s not just better for the environment — a 2022 study by Stockholm’s KTH Royal Institute of Technology found that the P-12 emits 97.5% less carbon dioxide emissions than diesel ferries — but also allegedly gives a smoother ride, what Hemming describes as a “magic carpet” experience.

“By flying above the water, the P-12’s hull is lifted above the friction from the water,” he says. That means less noise, a steadier ride, and none of the diesel fumes that keeps some people away from ferry travel. “The foil technology works much like aircraft wings that provide lift as water flows over them and creates a pressure difference,” Hemming adds.

Stockholm won’t be the only city with these futuristic ferries. Candela’s P-12s will soon be operating in Berlin, Germany, and eight vessels are being built for NEOM, Saudi Arabia’s $1.5 trillion “megacity project” for the ultrarich, with a 2025 delivery date.

Candela reps were even in New York this past August, offering test rides out of New York Harbor and meeting with potential customers. Could this mean floating ferries are coming to Manhattan soon? Hemming is tight-lipped, saying only that they’re “in talks with many private operators around the world, including New York.” And “if” it happens, hypothetically, a P-12 trip between Hoboken Terminal and Chelsea Market would take less than three minutes, as opposed to the current half hour journey by car or train. The electric ferry journey from Staten Island to lower Manhattan, which currently takes around 25 minutes, could be done in 11.

Electric ferries — which run on battery packs charged on land rather than diesel — aren’t exactly new. Norway introduced the world’s first electric ferry service in 2015. And Finland’s ferry system went all-electric in 2017.

But the last few years has seen a boom in ferry innovation, with all-electric fleets popping up in countries like Spain, India, Portugal, Denmark, Thailand, and New Zealand. The electric ship market, worth about $4.3 billion globally this year, is projected to grow to nearly $17 billion by 2032, according to Fortune Business Insights. 

The US has been slow to join the electric ferry revolution. The nation’s first electric ferry was introduced in Gee’s Bend, Ala., in 2019, and it didn’t exactly capture the country’s imagination. Several other cities and states have been working to introduce e-ferries, including Washington State, which (after repeated delays because of unexpected costs over the past few years) may finally get their first electric fleet in 2028.

New York has had similar problems getting their electric ferry initiatives off the ground, despite being a prime candidate for the technology. The city has set an ambitious goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050. And Niagara Falls, just seven hours north, has offered a template of what’s possible, launching their first all-electric tourist ferries back in 2020.

There were promising signs in 2022, when New York Cruise Lines announced a partnership with the Swedish company Green City Ferries. Together, they would build The Beluga24, a high-speed, zero-emission, low-wake ferry capable of holding 147 passengers and 28 bicycles, which would debut at New York Harbor by the spring of 2024. But the launch date came and went, and no ferry materialized.

“We were a bit too early in New York,” says Hans Thornell, Green City Ferries’ founder and CEO. (Reps from New York Cruise Lines declined to comment.) He says there were problems with the Harbor’s charging infrastructure, and it became increasingly difficult to obtain batteries that “met the MADE IN USA rules.”

Thornell is referring to the century-old Jones Act, which stipulates that all boats that transport goods between American ports must be manufactured in the US. “Our Swedish battery supplier Echandia has recently set up a production facility in Washington State,” he says. “Now we’re just looking for an investor who’s interested in emission-free commuting on water.”

Not everybody is enthusiastic about the possibilities. Joan Sammon, founder of a boutique oil and gas advisory firm, says that most supporters of “environmentally friendly travel options” like to pretend that the technology “is being built by union workers in Michigan. Far from that reality, the battery industry upon which U.S. and global consumers rely for its ‘green battery technology,’ including ferries, is almost entirely controlled by China, a Communist country with a stunningly poor record of upholding environmental standards.”

Even ensuring that all the parts and manufacturing are ethically sourced, there’s still the matter of cost. Patrick Finn, a former maritime technology analyst who now works as a harbormaster in Newport, Maine, says that the reason countries like Denmark, Sweden, and Norway are leading the electric ferry race is because they have “one of the longest running taxation schemes for air pollution.” Their governments “support cutting edge innovation through grants and encourage companies to take on risk and experiment,” he says.

At least in some parts of the US, that’s starting to change. In California, the San Francisco Bay Ferry, a public transit passenger ferry service which carries around 8,000 passengers every weekday, recently secured an $11 million grant from the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) to build high-speed electric ferries.

“This program will help the United States catch up with the rest of the world when it comes to reducing maritime greenhouse gas emissions,” says Tom Hall, the company’s director of operations. While the expense of building the first fleet won’t be small — they hope to launch SF Bay Ferry’s first electric vessel commercially in 2026 — Hall expects that in the long run, the operational costs of electric vessels “will be lower than our current diesel fleet.”

That may not be true if the technology continues to get more sophisticated. Last summer, Norway tech company Zeabuz unveiled the MF Estelle, the world’s first fully autonomous emission-free ferry. Along with maritime radar, LiDAR, and a maritime-specific AIS transponder, the ferry is operated by an “AI Captain” algorithm, says Zeabuz co-founder and CEO Øyvind Smogeli. 

The AI Captain is trained using an advanced simulator or “virtual world,” which includes a wide range of operational scenarios. Its navigation skills are “safer and more efficient than the average human captain,” Smogeli tells The Post. “With over 80% of all accidents at sea being due to human error, an ‘AI Captain’ does not have to be perfect for it to save a lot of lives.”

In Denmark, another ground-breaking e-ferry called the Ellen is setting the bar even higher. Introduced in 2019 (at a cost of $23.6 million, about 40% more than traditional ships), the Ellen is capable of traveling further than most electric ferries — 22 nautical miles — and carrying up to 200 passengers and 30 cars. It’s also got a massive amount of power, over 50 times the battery capacity of a Tesla. And according to a BBC report, it could single-handedly reduce CO2 emissions by 2,000 tons every year.

But Hemming insists that bigger isn’t always better, especially when it comes to electric ferries. Most ferries built for intra-city or coastal transport are capable of carrying 300 or more passengers, he says, but they don’t usually fill all of their seats. 

“In Stockholm, vessels typically carry 10% of their passenger capacity.,” he says. “So fuel and money is spent on shuttling around a lot of empty seats.” With the P-12 big enough to carry just 30 passengers, it’s also more affordable to build, so cities can afford a bigger fleet of ships.  “Think of the P-12 like a city bus on the water,” Hemming says. 

Sooner or later, he says, electric ferries are coming to cities like New York, and they’re going to change the way people use public transportation. “It’ll be a paradigm shift in the maritime industry, much like when cars and buses replaced boats in transport,” Hemming says. “Now it’s the other way around — we’ll see a comeback for transport on our waterways.”