Ready, steady, Ro! Wellboat fitted out in record time
A second hybrid vessel has been handed over to wellboat company Rostein, three and a half months after it took delivery of the world’s first such boat.
The Ro Venture is a sister ship to the Ro Vision, which went into service for Norwegian salmon farmer SalMar at the end of March.
Both boats are equipped with a battery pack from Siemens, three sets of diesel generators from Yanmar and have selective catalytic reduction (SCR) systems to reduce nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions from the diesel engines.
‘A formidabe effort’
Norwegian shipyard Larsnes Mekaniske Verksted, which built the vessels, said Ro Venture had been fitted out in a record time of just under four and a half months.
“We delivered Ro Vision at the end of March and considering the time we have been in, with the challenges around the Covid-19 situation, our own employees and our subcontractors have made a formidable effort in this period, where we have had almost full operation,” Larsnes Mek said on its Facebook page.
The battery pack in each of the wellboats is intended to allow so-called “peak shaving”, which involves proactively managing overall demand to eliminate short-term demand spikes.
Recharge batteries
“When we are in operation, energy consumption varies a lot, and then we can save and run an extra motor that has little to do by draining the battery instead of having enough energy to take the peaks,” Rostein vice president Glen Bradley explained when the Ro Vision was delivered in March.
“At the same time, in situations where we have overproduction of energy, we can use it to recharge the batteries.”
The battery packs also provide back-up for the vessels at the cage edge, removing the wasteful requirement to have a second diesel engine running in case the first fails.
