Shipowners and operators may be able to decrease their fuel-related costs and pollutant emissions up to 30%, thanks to a new system created by Bound4blue. The Spanish company aims at delivering automated wind-assisted propulsion systems (also called wingsails) that can be integrated onto a wide range of vessels. The Beam spoke with one of the founders, José Miguel Bermúdez.
Who are the people behind Bound4blue?
The project was founded by Cristina Aleixendri, David Ferrer, and me, José Miguel Bermúdez. The three of us are aeronautical engineers, which clearly served as the foundation of the technology developed. We found soft sails installed in sailing boats or yachts, but none in commercial vessels. We believed we could apply our knowledge in aeronautics to build a high-lift device for the shipping industry adapted to its requirements, that could be the solution to the two showstopper challenges they are facing: high fuel operating expenses and emissions reduction pressure from international entities.
We have been selected as one of Europe’s most promising innovators under 35 by MIT and featured amongst the 30 brightest industry European entrepreneurs under the age of 30 by Forbes. The design, manufacture, and launch of scientific capsules to the space, the construction of efficient wind towers, or the deployment of Geodetic Quality Sea-Ice drift buoys in the Arctic are some examples that precede our team and that mark a business and technological trajectory for Bound4blue.
The team is nowadays formed by 15 people, who combine several expertise in different fields of business and engineering, including aerospace engineering, naval architects, electronics engineering, statisticians and mechanical engineering.
How exactly do the automated wind assisted propulsion systems work? Can we talk about renewable energy in this case?
Bound4blue’s wingsail system generates effective thrust from wind power and thereby reduces the engine power required, saving fuel and pollutant emissions. For example, one of the latest cases we are working on is a Handysize (183-meter length) vessel, operating in the route Busan (South Korea) – Seattle (US). In this case, installing two 30-meter units of our system, we can save more than 940 tons of fuel per year, which represents more than 2,900 tons of CO2 savings per year, with an investment payback period of less than three years. Having successfully passed all the tests in the prototyping phase and being within the pilot phase, our systems are now being implemented on four ships.
So to sum up, of course we can talk about renewable energy in this case. The only source we are using in the overall process is the wind power, which is directly used to propel the ships with no intermediate energy conversion. In the end and from a conceptual point of view, it is the same process that humanity has been using for thousands of years, using the wind to navigate.
Image courtesy Bound4blue
What makes this technology innovative?
Bound4blue’s innovative technology is a creative application of an already existing one. Wind was once used centuries ago to propel vessels, so it is as simple as going back to the basics but using 21st century aeronautical technology. The solution was inside the industry from the very beginning, but we were able to take our aeronautical knowledge and build it on top of an ancient concept to create Bound4blue’s solution. The challenge we had to deal with was adapting this technology to commercial vessels and finding solutions to problems that are specific to those vessels.
Our technology is capable of providing double-digit fuel savings and emissions reduction with a payback below five years, it can be folded (useful for fleets with air-draft or operations limitations), it has extended operability thanks to the rotation capability and it works with a simple and fully autonomous operation, so no extra training or workload from the crew is required.
What can its impact on the shipping sector be? How can it help reduce emissions in the long term?
Maritime transport is a key industry for our society, transporting over 80% of the worldwide cargo. However, its pollutant emissions are a major environmental challenge. Maritime transport accounts for 3% of the global CO2 emissions, 15% of NO worldwide emissions and 13% of SO2 global emissions; it is having a direct impact on our planet in forms of global warming or acid rain, and being responsible of 14 million cases of childhood asthma each year and 60,000 cardiopulmonary and lung cancer deaths annually. In fact, maritime transport generates as much CO2 as the sixth most polluting country in the world, and the 16 largest vessels in the world generate the same amount of Sulphur emissions as the entire global fleet of cars.
Our technology reduces the emissions produced in the maritime transport of cargo and people by decreasing the use of fossil fuel with the same level of energy used by the ship. According to the Impact Forecast Analysis we carried out using the Climate Impact Forecast tool, more than 590 thousand tons of CO2 emissions will be saved in the following five years due to Bound4blue’s forecasted installations. So our technology will be a massive emission saver in the upcoming years. Also, our solution provides huge opportunities to modernize the infrastructure which will create new jobs and promote greater prosperity across the globe.
What kind of setbacks have you encountered, and what kind of support helped you get through? Where will future endeavors bring you?
As with any product development, there is a risk of obtaining lower performances and not achieving the desired economic viability for the market. The technological and practical feasibility have been proven so far by our land prototypes and the demo is being run for merchant and fishing vessels.
Bound4blue’s solution is highly capital intensive, but we have already succeeded in raising over €5.8 million contribution from private investors and grants. In this type of venture, there is always a risk of slow market acceptance and adoption, but interest in the product has already been proven. Bound4blue has received funding from the European Regional Development Fund throughout several projects granted by the Government of Catalonia and the Government of Cantabria, as well as from the European Maritime and Fisheries Fund (EMFF) throughout two projects which are being developed right now together with other European companies. Moreover, Bound4blue received funding from EIT Climate KIC and presently financial support throughout the extraordinary COVID-19 venture support call. EIT Climate KIC has supported us with financing, mentoring, training and access to a global network of investors, as well as increasing our media exposure. They have helped us translate our business model into more transactions with customers that are validating our core value proposition, as well as enabled us to attract more capital to progress into the next stage in the business development.
Bound4blue is now at a pre-commercial stage. The next step is to implement a worldwide industrial network (shipyards, systems manufacturing and assembly), as well as to grow the team in the business development and commercial departments to expand operations and boost sales in Europe and Asia. Moreover, we will undergo incremental development to decrease costs while increasing efficiency and security.
Hyundai Motors is recalling 145,235 EVs and other “electrified” vehicles in the US, citing concerns about a loss of driving power, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said on Friday.
The NHTSA announced this morning that the recall affects selected IONIQ 5 and IONIQ 6 EVs, as well as certain luxury Genesis models, including the GV60, GV70, and G80 electrified variants, from the 2022-2025 model years, Reuters reported.
It looks like the issue stems from “the integrated charging control units in these vehicles, which may become damaged and fail to charge the 12-volt battery. This malfunction could lead to a complete loss of drive power, posing safety risks for drivers,” the NHTSA stated.
If you’re an owner of one of these Hyundai models dating 2022-2025, stay tuned. Hyundai has not yet provided a timeline as to when affected vehicles will be repaired.
To make that happen, the company’s dealers will inspect and replace the charging unit and its fuse if necessary, NHTSA said. Free of charge, of course.
Importantly, no crashes, injuries, fatalities, or fires due to this issue have been reported in the US, Hyundai reported.
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Tesla announced that ‘Actually Smart Summon,’ its autonomous driving feature that enables moving its vehicles without anyone inside over short distances, is now being launched in Europe and the Middle East.
The automaker’s Full Self-Driving suite of features has been limited in those markets due to regulations and Tesla’s focus on making them work in North America first.
Actually Smart Summon is the vision-only version of Tesla’s “smart summon” feature, which was released years ago on Tesla vehicles with ultrasonic sensors.
When Tesla transitioned away from ultrasonic sensors, Smart Summon was one of the missing features that Tesla had yet to adapt to the vision-only (cameras and neural nets) system.
However, that’s only in North America where Tesla focuses its Full Self-Driving (FSD) development, the feature package that includes Actually Smart Summon, also referred to as ‘ASS’.
Most of Tesla’s other markets, including Europe, don’t have the same capabilities under the Full Self-Driving package. That’s partly due to regulations, but Tesla also focuses on making the features work on North American roads first.
Now, Tesla has announced that its Actually Smart Summon feature is launching in Europe and the Middle East:
The feature can only be used on private roads, like parking lots and driveways. Most people have used it to bring their vehicles parked in a large parking lot to them as they exit a store or restaurant. However, the vehicle moves quite slowly under the feature and the owner needs to keep an eye on it at all time and be ready to cancel the summon as Tesla doesn’t take any responsibility for accidents caused by using Actually Smart Summon., like all other FSD features.
Therefore, most people I know who have the feature, myself included, tried once or try to see or impress some friends who have never seen a car move without anyone inside and then stopped using it.
The feature’s main useful use-case is for people with extremely tight parking spots. It enables them to exit the vehicle before it is in its final parking spot and then move the car in and out remotely.
However, that has been the case for years with the regular Smart Summon, as you generally don’t need the vehicle to handle complex parking lots. You mostly need it to move a few feet forward or backward.
US Automakers are planning to ask Mr. Trump to retain President Biden’s EPA exhaust rules, in the face of signs that Mr. Trump might try to reverse them. If the rules are reversed, it would cost Americans hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of deaths per year.
Interestingly, this is the opposite of what big auto did the last time a reality TV show came to the White House – signaling that they have perhaps learned their lesson this time ’round.
First, some history.
In the middle of the 20th century, the effects of human activity on the atmosphere became readily apparent. Certain cities – with Los Angeles among the forefront – were choked by smog, and it was soon found out that vehicle pollution was the primary reason for this smog.
Since Los Angeles was one of the most smog-choked cities, California led the way on clean air regulation, creating the California Air Resources Board in 1967 (under then-Governor Ronald Reagan).
The federal government gave California special dispensation to set stricter regulations than the rest of the country, in recognition that it had a unique smog problem in its primary metropolis. California has retained this dispensation, in the form of a “waiver,” since then. And other states can follow California’s rules, but only if they copy all of the rules exactly.
Thus, there have been two separate sets of clean air regulation in this country since then – the federal rules, and then the “CARB states” which follow California’s rules.
In 2012 that finally changed, when President Obama’s EPA negotiated with California to finally harmonize these standards and also implement higher fuel efficiency nationwide. This would have been a huge boon for both industry and consumers, saving money and giving regulatory certainty to the auto industry.
But then, in 2016, the candidate who got the 2nd most votes in the presidential election was headed for the White House. And automakers responded by immediately lobbying to torpedo these standards, even before inauguration.
Now, you might think that asking a profoundly ignorant individual, who ended up staffing the EPA with bought-and-sold science deniers (huh, that would never happen again would it?), to change rules which had already been set through years of negotiation and lobbying was not a great idea. And you’d be right.
Not long after automakers had the dumb idea to ask an idiot to fix something that wasn’t broken, that idiot went and broke things further, fracturing the agreement between California and the federal government and ensuring less regulatory certainty for automakers.
But it was too late, and we are now back in the era of disparate regulatory regimes – something which John Bozzella, head of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation (formerly called Global Automakers), keeps complaining about these days, despite having lobbied for exactly this in the first place.
The US EPA and California are still not fully harmonized, but both released recent new standards which do have somewhat similar targets. If a manufacturer builds towards one set of rules, they’ll probably not be too far off from meeting the other.
So in the end, we did get better emissions regulations and California has continued to push forward with clean air regulations, thus signaling a failure on the part of Mr. Trump to cause the long term harm to Americans that he and his oil industry solicitors so desperately seem to desire.
The most recent EPA standards, finalized in March (after being softened at the auto industry’s request), do not mandate any particular powertrain, but rather require steep emissions cuts – and EVs are the easiest way to achieve lower emissions.
Notably, Tesla lobbied in favor of making this last set of standards stronger, and they also lobbied against ruining the Obama/CA standards in 2016 – being one of very few automakers who were on the correct side of that discussion.
Despite that the President Biden EPA’s rules do not mandate any particular powertrain, Mr. Trump, in his usual ignorance, has said that he will end the nonexistent EV mandate. And now that he has received more votes than his opponent for the first time (after three tries, and despite committing treason in 2021 for which there is a clear legal remedy), it looks like the upcoming EPA might be directed to end these emissions cuts and fuel/health cost savings for Americans.
But in this instance, it sounds like the automakers might actually do the right thing for once, and ask the government not to do any rollbacks, and instead let them continue on with the plans without disruption from a convicted felon who seems determined to cede a US EV manufacturing boom back to China.
Detroit’s Big Three automakers – GM, Ford and Stellantis – are all reportedly trying to figure out how to ensure that these rules stay in place. The mentality is that constantly changing regulations are not beneficial for companies – particularly in the auto realm, where models take on the order of 7 years to plan and execute. Long-term planning is important for the hundreds of billions in manufacturing investment that EVs have attracted in the US during Biden’s EV push.
These attitudes are notable, given that this is not what automakers did in 2016/2017. That time, they compulsively pushed for fewer regulations, and now they are asking for regulations to remain in place.
It’s further notable that Tesla CEO Elon Musk, whose company lobbied strongly in favor of emissions cuts and makes more use of the federal EV tax credit than any other company, is now allied with the very entity that’s looking to harm EVs. It seems that we have entered opposite world.
On the other hand, a former reality TV host – tagged along with by the CEO of the company that has sold more electric cars than any other – seem determined to kill electric cars, despite the harm that would cause to Americans’ pocketbooks and health insurance premiums. And that famously vindictive character may be even more spurred towards this harmful course of action after failing in his efforts the first time.
Who ya got?
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