alt.hn

6/22/2026 at 2:55:51 PM

DHL Set to Transport Goods on New Wind-Powered Cargo Ships

 https://www.wsj.com/pro/sustainable-business/dhl-set-to-transport-goods-on-new-wind-powered-cargo-ships-eca5d5a0

by julienchastang

6/22/2026 at 3:31:36 PM

"415 metric tons of goods. That means they have about five times more cargo space than an airplane, but are five times smaller in length than a typical container ship."

Not to take anything away from this (it's great), but for reference, an average vessel in Maersk's fleet can carry about 100,000 metric tons so you'd need about 250 of these to replace a single container ship.

Not sure why the article decided to compare cargo capacity of a airplane with the length of a container ship, but alas.

by mattas

6/22/2026 at 3:44:04 PM

This might be useful for a tiny island. Ship from a large Caribbean island to a small one for example. The distance means the round trip is day (night?) trip, and there a things you want shipped in every day, but airplanes are expensive. I'm sure there are other niches where there is only a small amount of cargo going from point A to point B as well. However in general the world needs more cargo and so this doesn't make sense for most.

by bluGill

6/22/2026 at 4:05:39 PM

Island hopping is a niche where electric flight might get started.

Hawaii is looking at running some next year.

https://www.sfgate.com/hawaii/article/hawaii-electric-airpla...

by ZeroGravitas

6/22/2026 at 6:51:54 PM

As I understand it, Hawaii had environmental concerns with ferries (requiring a review that was never completed), specifically whale/ship strikes and the risk of car-carrying ferries transporting invasive species between the islands. [1] I'm unsure if other islands would have similar concerns about cargo ships or not or if the environmental review would have been satisfactory if they'd just done it on time.

I'd expect ferries and/or small cargo ships to be an attractive option if allowed.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaii_Superferry

by scottlamb

6/23/2026 at 6:38:08 AM

The super ferry was incredible. Being able to drive your car on a different island was such a game changer vs buying flights for the fam and then having to rent a car. I miss it!

by hawaiianbrah

6/22/2026 at 4:45:52 PM

They do it on Vancouver Island in B.C.

by newsclues

6/22/2026 at 3:49:30 PM

I actually think there's an argument to be made for this to be an alternative to typical cargo ship operations.

The challenge when moving goods via ocean vessel is that everything takes _a long_ time. Loading and unloading the vessel can take days. Transit is weeks. Unloading the vessel takes days.

You have 2 options now: air freight which is crazy expensive but gets it there in a few days max or ocean freight which is relatively cheap but might take weeks. If you can cut out vessel loading/unloading you save at least a week.

by mattas

6/22/2026 at 4:54:39 PM

I find it hard to believe that you wouldn't lose any time you gain in loading/unloading to transit time inconsistency when you have to rely on wind. This is not even to mention the fact that these ships cannot make good use of big modern ports with cranes and the best logistical connections and that it would take 100+ of them with hundreds of crew to move as much as a single container ship can with 20 people. I could see them being useful in niche scenarios like cabotage within island/archipelago nations or shipping small loads on irregular schedules, but for anything else it is very hard to beat a container ship.

by amdsn

6/22/2026 at 5:30:06 PM

This is HN, we can use an analogy of TCP window size or UDP packet size in an underlying high latency medium and the receiver and sender have very high processing costs. So perhaps solving the unloading and loading logistics is also worth optimizing for like we did almost for free in computing space? But because we don't have ballpark numbers of each terribly well we're going to have some difficulties with a valid non abstract system design discussion.

by devonkim

6/22/2026 at 3:48:41 PM

Maybe they might not be restricted to Long Beach or Port Newark.

by SirFatty

6/22/2026 at 4:30:16 PM

Those ports have the rest of the infrastructure though and so it makes other logistics worse

by bluGill

6/22/2026 at 3:50:44 PM

This was my exact intuition. At 450 metric ton, we're three orders of magnitude away from what large container ships can do. It's a nice PoC but this is clearly just PR from DHL.

Air freight is also an odd comparison since it's usually time-sensitive and/or pricey ($100+ per pound).

by __sy__

6/22/2026 at 4:52:31 PM

It's DHL. If you want your package or pallet shipped to some island it might take a long while until a big container ship makes the next stop there. If it can stop there at all. For a package/freight company, the capability to run ships on your schedule to small harbors is valuable. And a catamaran could be a competitive alternative to other smaller container ships

What I don't understand is that they are talking about running it trans-Atlantic. Taking longer than a normal container ship, while taking less cargo. You save on fuel, but surely the crew costs must be eating up all those savings. And you're not really faster. Unless the plan is to go point-to-point between smaller harbors, making up any lost time by saving on cargo handling time

by wongarsu

6/22/2026 at 6:34:03 PM

You might not need much crew for a vessel that small. Automation can take care of most of it, and with the right equipment the ship can basically sail itself. Then you just need a captain and maybe some maintenance crew to keep the automation running.

by throwaway173738

6/22/2026 at 5:50:21 PM

Your crew isn't emitting hundreds of tons of CO2 burning the dirtiest fuel available on earth, though.

by b40d-48b2-979e

6/22/2026 at 4:54:12 PM

Smallish container ships are used a lot. Look at traffic from the big ports like Rotterdam to small ports like Orkanger or Kristiansand.

A lot of containers take a small-ship trip after the big-ship one.

by Arnt

6/22/2026 at 5:13:00 PM

The important metric should be emissions per metric ton though, including construction of the ships.

by pier25

6/22/2026 at 8:36:17 PM

> Not sure why the article decided to compare cargo capacity of a airplane with the length of a container ship, but alas.

Because journalism is plagued by innumeracy. Same reason the author is talking about the length of cargo ships instead of the volume.

by rayiner

6/22/2026 at 5:39:38 PM

Urm, it's pretty well documented that historically the biggest deciding factor in shipping is cost. The size of the vessel and the travel speed are unimportant vs cost of the journey. So if they can essentially remove fuel cost, they're able to reduce the shipping cost and hence outcompete bigger vessels on the only metric that had historically mattered in that industry

by ffsm8

6/22/2026 at 11:57:12 PM

the way the american administration is pushing for de-globalization... this might be the perfect future market.

by senectus1

6/22/2026 at 5:39:01 PM

[flagged]

by cbmuser

6/22/2026 at 3:42:03 PM

At the risk of sounding overly negative, these things are pretty much always vanity projects. Someone wanted a really cool boat and managed to get some investors onboard. It’s more about an aesthetic than a business case.

We’re talking here about a fairly large crew that will transport a small amount of cargo while taking a really long time. On top of that, these aren’t container ship so loading/unloading will take a long time. There is no economic case here.

The only way you can make this somewhat work is by selling the aesthetic/story. E.g.: this coffee was shipped by sailboat. But even then, notice how every company linked in the article of another commenter aren’t actually operating anymore…

by strongpigeon

6/23/2026 at 10:39:10 AM

Is it powered by a windmill from a miniature golf course going out of business? I know some guys who built one like that once, but it sank on its maiden voyage.

by pseudohadamard

6/22/2026 at 4:11:10 PM

Let's see it last. It won't. This is just a short-term private endeavor/vanity-press project. Just because a business uses a "sustainable technology" does not make it a sustainable business. Comparing cargo ships to airplanes is apples vs. oranges and reveals the author's deliberate "headline" motivation and lack of technology understanding compared to the actual ground truth of shipping.

Until fuel prices change for the long-term and/or emissions regulations have an order of magnitude uptick as well as covering far more than sulfur (see IMO 2020 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MARPOL_73/78#IMO_2020 ), there will be zero economic incentive to use wind-power over diesel/bunker-fuel power.

And no, any advantages of docking at smaller ports are defeated by those ports having less land-transit access and we already have fleets of (smaller) cargo vessels serving these ports at insanely low $/ton/mile rates.

Just like farms, all of the economics point to larger vessels, larger ports, and operating entity consolidation. See "The Box" by Marc Levinson https://a.co/d/0gtBkWwt or watch a few "What's Going On With Shipping" https://www.youtube.com/@wgowshipping videos.

It will take some sort of global political or environmental catastrophic externality to even budge, let alone change, the status quo.

by calmbonsai

6/22/2026 at 6:21:34 PM

That sounds so familiar. I swear I once read the same comment about renewable energy generation. :)

by mmooss

6/22/2026 at 11:01:03 PM

They performance potential was always there for solar and wind energy. It was a known quantity that was an engineering inevitability.

The industrial scale-up just happened quickly since the same tech could be leveraged from chip manufacturing for solar and composite construction from airplanes for wind turbines.

There's no similar performance potential for wind-powered vessels over combustion-powered vessels that can be "scaled-up" and, if need be, we can make green fuel from raw materials and still economically out-perform wind vessels.

by calmbonsai

6/22/2026 at 4:06:57 PM

In the big picture I am again and again fascinated by this. One of the oldest commercial services out there (post / shipping) proves repeatedly to be very innovative and strong in realization of new stuff like this. They were the first or one of the first, who deployed electrical cargo vans. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetscooter

To be accurate, they bought the startup. But still: they didn't wait for the automotive company to come up with a e cargo van.

by lschueller

6/22/2026 at 3:59:27 PM

Someone should make a sport out of this.

We already have sailing sports where people race all kinds of wind-powered vessels, and they push the envelope of tech development, just like F1 and the car industry.

Also rich people love this sort of thing. Give them something to do with all that money that has some sort of chance of improving things.

by zdw

6/22/2026 at 4:09:19 PM

Look no further! SailGP is pretty much the maritime version of F1

by mockerell

6/22/2026 at 4:24:09 PM

The startup building and operating the boats was founded by a famous yacht racer

by colechristensen

6/22/2026 at 6:57:53 PM

What if we put a large wind turbine on a ship? A sort of modern set of sails if you will.

A mid sized cargo ship has a 50_000Kw engine. A mid sized offshore wind turbine makes 1_000_000Kw. So depending on which way the wind is blowing it could work. Put a diesel electric drive and a full sized engine then use the wind turbine to see how much it could reduce fuel use. I was even having fun dreaming about the incidentals. how hard it would be to build a folding/quick assembly mechanism for the turbine to make harbor/bridge/crane access problems go away. could we duel purpose the wind turbine boom as a crane boom. Would a vertical turbine make sense?

While reading up on wind turbines I ran across the depressing story of the small ferry Hornblower Hybrid. A lot of hype on how environmentally friendly it was in 2008 when it was retrofitted with two vertical turbines. But my first though was "those turbines look awful small" and they are, the best they could do is power the lights not the boat itself. The boat itself was retro fitted in 2024 and lost it's electric drive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornblower_Hybrid

I bet even if it would work from an energy point of view, the extra complexity of the system would make it more expensive than a straight diesel ship from an operations and maintenance point of view.

by somat

6/22/2026 at 7:12:37 PM

There are several designs of kite propelled ships. Some commercially available.

A generator and a propeller would only add weight and complexity for a loss in efficiency.

There have also been ships with vertical turbines mechanically coupled to propellers. But you can't build them very tall, so you lose the best winds. Those haven't been good enough in the past.

by marcosdumay

6/22/2026 at 3:34:42 PM

I love this idea, but do these ships exist yet? I can only find renderings, and the company's "roadmap" page is not a roadmap (https://vela-transport.com/feuille-de-route/).

The only real footage I can find is a construction video from a year ago: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DL9CSLdtkaP/

by burkaman

6/22/2026 at 4:11:47 PM

The ships aren't new, but a large transport operator like DHL buying into the concept is.

Well, unless you count pre-motor cargo ships of course, those were the only option for centuries.

by jeroenhd

6/22/2026 at 6:41:24 PM

I dont know what I was expecting on the roadmap page after you said it was not a roadmap, but I did not expect to see a whale jumping over a human as part of the "roadmap"

by niwtsol

6/23/2026 at 9:46:08 AM

An interesting comparison would be a standard cargo ship that goes as slow as possible.

"Slow steaming" is already in use and has some dramatic impacts on fuel use.

The limit seems to be "hotel loads" i.e. constant loads needed for crew, but the sailboat will have those as well and not spread over as much cargo.

It's entirely possible that a sail boat that follows the wind might be higher carbon per cargo kg than a giant standard ship going very slowly directly to the port.

by ZeroGravitas

6/22/2026 at 4:04:02 PM

> "The wind-powered boats could be especially appealing when oil prices have shot up because of the Iran war."

Check of oil prices same day article was published:

WTI $73.51/bbl BRENT $77.57/bbl MURBAN: $70.46/bbl

by CodeWriter23

6/22/2026 at 5:14:26 PM

What we see in quotes is not the price of oil being shipped right now; it is usually a one-month futures contract. Traders expect that by this time, Hormuz will reopen. If it does not, they will lose money, but the actual price could be much higher.

by citrin_ru

6/22/2026 at 8:39:45 PM

Close to the bottom price over the past 5 years is what it is.

by CodeWriter23

6/23/2026 at 1:00:03 AM

Oh wow, so they are only using sails?

The article seemed a bit light on actually how it's been powered.

My initial assumption was that it's just going to harvest wind out of the air to power electric turbines since there's probably so much wind at the sea so much of the time.

But there's a quote in the article that says we're going with the wind, and not in a straight line.

by ElijahLynn

6/22/2026 at 6:49:19 PM

> The boats are still being built, but Vela said it hopes to have five trimarans operating by 2030 to meet its once-a-week shipment goal.

Why is it always like this ?

"Slight improvement to be delivered in beta in a 5 years for limited users at premium prices.

Meanwhile, the latest catastrophe auto-updated 4 times while you were reading."

by phtrivier

6/22/2026 at 5:55:09 PM

I remember seeing news about sails on cargo ship twenty years ago?

But whatever reduces the use of "bunker fuel" which is the most toxic vile fuel around (cruise ships use it too)

by ck2

6/22/2026 at 5:18:12 PM

It's notable that setting sails will be a legitimate profitable venture. Too late to sail the seas, and too early to sail the seas.

by arikrahman

6/22/2026 at 3:47:36 PM

20 years ago I read this magazine article about putting kites on container ships for efficiency. This gadget seems to have durable appeal to entrepreneurs and/or suckers.

https://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2005/09/17/sa...

The company recently went bankrupt, by the way. It turns out that gigantic container ships are already incredibly efficient.

by jeffbee

6/22/2026 at 6:40:20 PM

Incredibly efficient, but if they're burning hydrocarbons to move, at scale they are incredibly damaging to earth's atmosphere, and to animals disrupted by engine and propeller noise.

International trade is wonderful, all this new tech we're drowning in is amazing, and- understand that every one of us will eventually die, hopefully passing on some positive influence to others along the way, and that it turns out opting for the new car, the big climate-controlled house, the weekly/monthly/annual/still-too-frequent long-distance flights/drives, the new pocket computer every few years, the fancy unnecessarily-powerful laptop, the hours spent on all the man-child hobbies because we haven't outgrown our childhood insecurities, all this is an incredible waste compared to the meaning derived from healthy relationships with people within walking distance, tending the land we get our food from.

by meristohm

6/22/2026 at 7:02:18 PM

Shipping uses so little energy that switching it to synthetic liquid fuels while we figure out something else is plausible. More plausible than reverting the fleet to 2000x more sailing vessels.

by jeffbee

6/22/2026 at 6:25:59 PM

> This gadget seems to have durable appeal to entrepreneurs and/or suckers.

Or most research and technological development requires years or generations of experimentation and failure before success. And every time, the creators and innovators are told they are wasting their time, suckers, look how many failures came before you, ...

by mmooss

6/22/2026 at 7:56:10 PM

Consider the steam powered airplane. It required decades of experimentation and failure before success, and that technical success was a dead-end.

by eesmith

6/22/2026 at 9:43:39 PM

Consider the airplane.

by mmooss

6/23/2026 at 5:30:57 AM

Yes, the steam powered airplane is a dead-end branch in the development of the airplane. Unlike most of the dead-end branches, it actually worked, in a limited technical sense.

Most research and technological development fail, and most of those which succeed in a technical sense end up being worse in a practical sense than other alternatives.

There are a lot of gadgets where "the creators and innovators are told they are wasting their time, suckers, look how many failures came before you" -- and the detractors were right.

The screw-propelled vehicle, after over a century of development, has slightly more success than the steam airplane because there is a niche use as amphirols. But for nearly every case it was designed for, caterpillar tracks, half-tracks, or even tires are better.

No matter how much R&D you put into it, it seems impossible that a roller ship like the Ernest Bazin will have commercial success. Ditto the gimbaled cabin design of the SS Bessemer, meant to stave off seasickness in the passengers.

Various gadgets lie on the border where they seem tantalizingly commercially realizable, like kites on container ships. That's where kooks and hucksters thrive.

by eesmith

6/23/2026 at 5:38:02 AM

> That doesn't change the face that most research and technological development fail

I agree. So what? If you have a better way, you will no doubt be very, very successful and your name will be in history books.

But so far nobody has a better way. It follows that we cannot predict which R&D will fail to be developed or fail to be useful - otherwise we wouldn't have so many failures. And therefore the claim upthread, that they know now the future outcome of this research, is false.

by mmooss

6/23/2026 at 1:12:01 PM

Your comment "Or most research and technological development requires years or generations ..." has an implicit but important missing qualifier.

"Or most SUCCCESSFUL research and technological development requires years or generations of experimentation and failure before success."

Most research and technological development fail, which is why creators and innovators may be told they are wasting their time by looking at well-traversed, almost certain dead ends in hopes of finding a new, long-overlooked path, rather than putting their efforts into R&D more likely to succeed.

We can absolutely predict that some R&D will fail to be useful - I mentioned a few. Here's another - a radium-powered reading lamp.

by eesmith

6/22/2026 at 5:31:18 PM

Another version of the idea is still around:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotor_ship

by WorkerBee28474

6/22/2026 at 3:37:23 PM

This is like the 1984 calendar ripping meme except the year is 1600.

by ecshafer

6/22/2026 at 6:09:16 PM

Cargo ships powered by the wind, we are living in the future!

by amirhirsch

6/22/2026 at 4:07:41 PM

[flagged]

by flixspiek

6/22/2026 at 4:29:55 PM

This will be great for their customer service, now they'll have a new excuse for losing your package.

by nickserv