As economic lockdowns complicate efforts to bring electricity to every corner of the planet, one company is putting generation units on ships that can sit offshore and plug into local grids at short notice. Karpowership is busy marketing floating power plants across the developing world, where governments are seeking extra voltage to power hospitals and other facilities to keep the lights on during the coronavirus pandemic.
Vessels can hook into an onshore grid quickly, sidestepping the red-tape and construction issues involved with building a traditional power plant. And these ships come with their own fuel — liquefied natural gas and fuel oil — tapping into markets that are currently oversupplied.
“We can deploy them in less than 30 days,” Zeynep Harezi, chief commercial officer of Kapowership, said by phone from her office in Istanbul where the ships are designed.
The generators on the ships can produce between 36 megawatts to 470 megawatts of electricity and are already fully financed. While the ships use fossil fuels and present a challenge to the global drive for cleaner energy, they remain among the few solutions for feeding power to remote areas.
Such ships can work well in places with high barriers for onshore power stations or that lack access to gas pipelines, the International Gas Union said in its annual LNG report. There’s also risks: high cost and up-front capital requirements. Also, floating power plants concepts compete with more traditional units that run on liquid fuels, renewables and nuclear power, which may receive governmental support over LNG, the report said.