Falmouth Harbour has been announced as one of the UK organisations to trial an electric workboat as RS Electric Boats secures funding for its Zero Emission Network of Workboats (ZENOW) project.
ZENOW has received £4.1m in Government grant funding from the UK Shipping Office for Reducing Emissions (UK Shore) and Innovate UK as part of its Zero Emissions Vessels and Infrastructure competition (ZEVI). This new funding brings the total project to £5.4m.
ZENOW is a partnership of 15 UK marine businesses and organisations, led by RS Electric Boats. The project will deploy the world's largest network of electric workboats - 20 electric workboats, powered by five Aqua Superpower chargers- code them ready for service and then, during and after a three-year period, analyse the data to provide evidence, advice and support for any of the circa 10,000 small harbours and marinas across the world getting ready to switch to electric.
The electric workboats will be delivered to ten UK locations by March 1 2025.
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The project includes a three-year demonstration phase with various partners operating the vessels in representative environments. Sea trial data will form part of the partners' detailed work to understand and develop how electric boats are used in practice, for example, by providing data on exact duty cycles and usage patterns. This data will enable ZENOW to advise on adopting electric technology in a maritime environment and help shape other geographical electric networks.
Jon Partridge, chief executive of RS Electric Boats said: "This data will give us, and RAD Propulsion, the know-how to understand how people operate the vessels. Electric boats are wanted all round the world, and ZENOW will be able to offer a series of like for like cases, giving people the confidence that electric can work in their environments.
“The network covers a broad sector of commercial work and activities. It's a who's who of leading businesses and operators with four harbours, the RYA (coaching), the Environment Agency and many more. The project has very good representation across the commercial marine sector, which means that not only will we be protecting the marine environment, we'll also be creating blueprints for others in the sector. All harbours, marinas and ports globally will need to transition. They'll be able to use our know-how.”
Falmouth Harbour already has four vessels tasked with patrols, supporting novel technologies and scientific work and mooring checks. It will receive an RS Electric Pulse as part of the project.
Miles Carden, chief executive of Falmouth Harbour said: “We are incredibly excited in Falmouth Harbour by this announcement. We are working really hard to decarbonise our harbour operations. Reducing our scope one emissions is key to this. We feel that electric propulsion will have a really important role to play in decarbonising smaller harbour vessels utilising lessons learned from the growing EV market.
"However, there are lots of questions that need to be answered relating to how the vessels will perform in use day to day. The funding from Innovate UK is crucial to accelerate the deployment of these new, clean and green technologies into daily use. The 20 vessels designed and built as a result of this project will start to answer some important operational questions."
