Net Hero Podcast – With Sumit Bose

Are sails about to make a comeback on the world's cargo ships in a bid to decarbonise ocean transport?
When you tell people that sails could play a big part in decarbonising global shipping, it sounds almost absurdly old fashioned.
We spent the last century replacing wind with engines, building ever larger ships and burning enormous amounts of fuel to move most of the goods we consume around the planet. Yet after my conversation with OceanWings CEO Emmanuel Schalit, I came away thinking that perhaps the future of shipping is going to look rather more like its past than we imagined.
Emmanuel has been sailing since he was five and that connection with the sea has stayed with him throughout his life. He understands just how much power is sitting there for free if you know how to use it. “I started sailing at the age of five, which is a long time ago… I sailed around my part of France, which is Brittany. Then you go further. And at this point, I've sailed pretty much anywhere from the northern tip of Scotland all the way to the Greek islands.”
His point is not that we somehow return to wooden ships and canvas sails. Modern wind propulsion is an entirely different beast, using huge automated rigid wings controlled by sensors and software and fitted alongside the ship’s existing propulsion system.
And Emmanuel is very clear that this is not about wind replacing everything else.
“With the way the global economy is structured today, what our business is about is hybrid vessels, like the steamships of the end of the 19th century. We provide part of the propulsion with wind and the other part has to come from something else. Today diesel, tomorrow it could be alternative low emission diesel, hydrogen, it could even be battery. But it's really about combining both.”
That is what makes the concept so interesting to me. We spend an enormous amount of time debating whether shipping will eventually run on hydrogen, methanol, ammonia, batteries or some fuel we have not perfected yet. OceanWings starts from a much simpler place: whatever fuel you use, use less of it.
The technology can also be fitted to ships already operating, which matters when you consider how long commercial vessels remain in service.
“If you think about a global fleet of 100,000 ships, if we had to wait for them to be rebuilt, it's likely that both you and I would be dead before,” Emmanuel told me. “So we need a better solution. And the solution is that on many large segments, tankers, bulkers, LNG carriers, we can retrofit existing vessels.”
Then you get to the carbon maths and suddenly this stops sounding like a romantic idea about harnessing the wind and starts looking like a serious decarbonisation tool.
“One tonne of fuel, on a well-to-wake basis, is equivalent to four tonnes of CO2,” Emmanuel explained. “So every time you save a tonne of fuel, that's four tonnes of CO2 that will never reach the atmosphere. Very significant. That's why we wake up every morning and go to work.”
One wing alone, he says, can make a remarkable difference. “One of these wings, going back to what I said earlier, 1.3 tonnes of fuel per day, four tonnes, five tonnes of CO2 saved per day. You take an average ship that sails about 200 days per year. One wing sail saves about 1,000 tonnes of CO2 per year.”
Over its lifetime the numbers become even more striking. “The durability of that system is a minimum of 25 years. Every time we deliver one of these, we know that it has the potential, if it is used, to save 25,000 tonnes of CO2.”
I asked him the obvious question: what about the carbon involved in actually manufacturing the thing?
“The scope one, two, three cost of actually making one of these is 500 tonnes,” he replied. “We emit 500, we save 25,000. We are happy with that.”
But perhaps the most important argument is not environmental at all. It is commercial. Shipping companies are businesses and ultimately technology tends to scale when it saves them money as well as carbon.
Emmanuel put it better than I could. “Our mission is to reduce emissions but the product we sell is payback. The more expensive fuel gets, the more it makes sense to install those systems.”
That may ultimately be what takes wind propulsion from an interesting technology to something we see on ships everywhere.
Listen to my full conversation with Emmanuel Schalit of OceanWings on the Net Hero Podcast. Download the episode wherever you get your podcasts and please subscribe.
 
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Geopolitical tensions, price shocks and the net zero transition are driving volatility. Our latest podcast explores how on-site generation could help businesses manage the changing market
With geopolitical tensions, price shocks and the transition to net zero reshaping the energy landscape, businesses are facing a new era of commercial energy volatility.
Can Wattstor’s combination of onsite renewables, battery storage and flexible energy tariffs help businesses navigate the uncertainty – and even turn volatility into an opportunity?
Listen to the latest podcast episode to find out.
 
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For any enquiries, please contact nethero@futurenetzero.com.

Britain's homes need better insulation so could drones, thermal cameras and AI to find out exactly where we're wasting heat and money?
I have always known my house probably leaks heat. It's old, poor insulation in the loft, none in the walls and with lots of windows, I suspect I would rather not know how much of the money I spend on heating simply disappears through the roof and walls.
Well with some clever tech, Lucy Lyons can now tell me.
She is the co-founder of Kestrix and on this week's show, she explained how they are using drones, thermal imaging and AI to effectively create a heat map of our homes. Think Google Maps, but instead of finding the quickest route to the pub, you're finding where your bloody heating bill is escaping.
And we need something like it because retrofitting Britain house by house is an enormous job.
“One of my favourite statistics is that in the UK alone, to reach net zero before 2050, we need to retrofit something like 1.8 homes every single minute,” Lucy told me.
“It’s ridiculous. It’s a massive undertaking. And so the question that we set out to solve was not just how do you figure out which home needs what. How do you do this in a way that’s really scalable and really empirical at the same time?”
Rather than sending somebody into every property, Kestrix can fly over an entire area and work out which homes need attention first.
“We’re going to fly the drones over, say, a thousand homes. And that’s going to help you figure out, okay, with the budget I have this year, which are the 250 that make the most sense to retrofit? What are the measures that each of those 250 need?”
That becomes particularly interesting when you can go back afterwards and see whether the work actually worked.
Kestrix did exactly that with housing provider Peabody and Lucy says the results showed an average bill saving of around £520 per home every year, alongside carbon savings of more than a tonne. But the cameras also spotted something else...
“There were indications of thermal bridging, which is kind of like heat loss essentially around the window lintels in about half the properties,” she explained. “It’s something to flag. There’s still unnecessary heat loss here and it might indicate that the home is less healthy than they thought.”
And this is what I liked about Lucy's argument. Forget lecturing people about carbon. Show me my house, show me where the heat is disappearing and tell me what fixing it will save.
“If you understand the costs and the benefits of something, people are much more likely to buy in,” she said. “At the moment it’s like, ‘For the sake of the environment, you should really consider insulation.’ But okay, what about my house? What about my bills? No one can really answer that right now.”
...Maybe her drones and AI can.
Listen to my full conversation with Lucy on the Net Hero Podcast, download it wherever you get your podcasts and please subscribe.
 
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For any enquiries, please contact: nethero@futurenetzero.com
 

This episode it's all about human powered flight from what we produce everyday! 
 
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Well not literally - but is it time for us to use waste water much better as we face global water scarcity issues? Could this 'new water' help us tackle climate change?
 
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This week Academic Kirsty Denyer tells me how North Sea oil and gas workers are being left behind in the clean energy revolution!
 
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Loved this episode, I'm transported to mangrove forests where scientists have found incredible bacteria that can 'eat' plastic waste from the ocean..

This time, will the growth in solar globally need a bunch of robots to help us? Or is AI out to take our jobs?

This time I look at energy policy in Wales and explore if this model of energy devolution helps or hinders the net zero transition

This week Alec Taylor from charity Oceana tells me the risks from old oil rigs in the North Sea and the lessons to be learned for offshore wind