As both a sailor and a wingsail designer, I've followed this space for a long time. I've gotta say this is just one of the thousands of trial PR announcements for different companies which develop something and think it's gonna save the world.

https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

We've been seeing these every other year or so ever since the walker wingsail back in the mid 80's:

https://www.change-climate.com/Transport_Land_Sea_Sustainabl...

As to why they are never successful, I don't exactly know. Most of the companies that put these on trial just quietly retire them without adoption, and never explain why. It's not about ease of use, plenty of designs have near 100% automation and simple design. It's not really about maintenance, plenty of designs have almost maintenance-free design as well.

My best guess is that sails/wingsails/rotorsails have inherent height, which interferes with bridges and gantry cranes, and requires furling/stowing capabilities which them makes the systems a lot more complex. My next best guess is that in order to get meaningful propulsion, you introduce heeling, which is bad for container ships and potentially catastrophic for dry bulk.

If anyone else was confused why those pictures were of giant tubes and not canvas sails, you are not alone. Apparently those are some version of "Suction Sails". The vendor's website has a graphic that explains it, though it was fighting my ability to scroll.

https://bound4blue.com/esail/

Growing up as I did in an old seafaring town, quite near Ahab's ports of call, I love the romance of the sea and I listen exclusively to sea chanties.

For low-value and bulk cargo, ships make sense, and modern computer-controlled sail trim and wind energy harvesting probably makes a great case. But high value cargo is largely today shipped by air. Nvidia wants money for its chips ASAP, too valuable to sit around non productively while being steamered. Maybe with surplus wind energy they could mine bitcoin while en route?

A sort of related topic, about 20 years ago during peak farm-to-table "buy local" fashion, the NY Times pointed out that lamb shipped from New Zealand (where is that on a map, I can't find it?) to New York City arrives with a lower carbon footprint than lamb delivered by trucks from nearby upstate NY farms, such are the economies of scale in shipping.

But now, blow me down me hearties, I look forward to dining on New Zealand lamb carried to my door by the winds of fortune!

59 different companies including mine responded to MARAD's recent RFI on nuclear powered merchant ships. Many people are realizing that wind, hydrogen, ammonia, etc are falling short for global scale shipping.

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/05/07/2026-09...

A 5% reduction in fuel is significant, especially as cargo ships are responsible for a disproportionate share of petro-pollution. They burn the cheapest petro gunk, emitting tremendous volumes of soot and such.

Sat next to a fusion researcher once on a commuter train.

This particular line struck me: "When oil prices go up, so does money for fusion research"

Feels the same for sail and cargo ships.

The most recent example, it's somewhat down the page at the gcaptain URL:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliner_Origin

This seems to happen once every 20 years.

Stena claim that their Flettner rotors (spinny sails) reduce fuel use by 9%.

https://stenaline.com/media/stories/introducing-stena-connec...

They are in commercial service already on the Irish Sea.

Skysails tried, now they appear to have fully pivoted to land based power generation.

My dream future would see the oceans swarming with kite driven robotic boats that just cruise around under kite power, harvesting electricity with hydrogenerators as they go, feeding that power into a hydrolyser slowly filling some hydrogen storage unit that they drop off for sale at a port when full.

We need to start fitting nuclear reactors on cargo ships.

The technology is proven and reliable. Not to mention no emissions.

Possibly related: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2021/05/how-to-design-a-sa...

This site is really hostile to people who do any kind of javascript blocking.

Wouldn't it make more sense to store windpower at sea and transfer the resulting fuel to passing by ships?

Why is every paragraph in this article at most 2 sentences long, with most of them being a single sentence?

I feel that I read this same story every year ?

Can we bring zeppelins back next for air?

No, they’re really not.

Turns out, sail-power scales sublinearly and, shocker, the wind isn’t a reliable source of power for the logistics demands of today’s supply chains.

We’re never going back to wind, but we will be de-carbonizing shipping either with ammonia combustion, fuel cells, or both.