Corvus displays modular marine batteries

Marine battery maker Corvus demonstrated its modular idea at its stand, with SVP commercial product manager Kjetil Dent Tranberg saying the company’s approach had already worked for the world’s first fully electric fast ferry, the MS Medstraum, built at the Fjellstrand shipyard in Norway and operated by Kolumbus.

The company’s Dolphin Power system can be stacked in various directions and sizes according to the vessel’s space and power requirements, and are ideal for high-speed propulsion to reach maximum speed quickly or that need to be recharged frequently.

For the moment the only real choice is lithium batteries, but that could soon change, he later said.

“We are going modular,” he said at SMM. “Our modular approach means we can be at the forefront of new technologies that come to the market and don’t need to do different work on each component because we will already have worked on others.

”A development process takes 36 months typically, and our goal is to reduce that to six months ultimately because we’re not working on each individual component.”

The Dolphin series of batteries are for higher speed craft like ferries, which require batteries with special performance because of the demand ferries make on them – much like power tools, Traberg said.

“You need to have a very high cycle life compared with onshore energy storage systems,” he said. “The recharging cycles are much more demanding and not all applications woud be suitable for this.”

Traberg conceded that lithium batteries were unlikely to be the only option for marine in years to come, with an increasingly negative reputation becoming increasingly well known. They have several issues, not least their lack of recycling, mining practices and materials needed, such as cobalt, which is notoriously mostly sourced from Congolese mines using child labour.

Although he refused to give any details, Traberg did say that ‘a few winning formulas’ were in the pipeline,which had to be the case since the amount of electrification the world is going to need cannot possibly be achieved with one option.

“Manufacturers also have strong incentives to develop new kinds,” he said.