Determination of the feasibility of a climate project for the transfer of port tugboats to a fully electric power plant equipped with accumulators of electric power

A study of the foreign regulatory framework has shown that a reliable way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to zero by tugboats is to use vessels with a fully electric power plant consisting of rechargeable batteries. For this reason, the purpose of the study is to determine the feasibility of creating a climate project for the transfer of port tugboats to a fully electric power plant consisting of rechargeable batteries; the possibility of registering planned actions as a climate project; the economic feasibility of such a project in Russia and in the EU.
The article evaluates the applicability of this project and shows the conditions under which it becomes possible to obtain a positive effect, when the costs of implementing measures can be partially offset by the implementation of carbon units. The article shows that from a technical point of view, the climatic project of transferring a tugboat to a battery power plant is feasible, since at the moment the components themselves for conversion (batteries with the necessary characteristics, emergency diesel generators, etc.) are freely available, as well as similar samples of marine equipment. An important aspect and the main disadvantage of the climate project under study in our country is that for its registration it is necessary to prove that the actions taken will reduce the company's carbon footprint by the required amount (i.e. by 50,000 tons of CO2-eq/year), which can potentially be performed by a towing company spending about 16 thousand tons of petroleum fuel per year and/or owning a fleet of tugboats with a total capacity of 38 MW.
The results of calculations of the economic feasibility of the studied climate project in relation to the EU and the Russian Federation demonstrate that despite the favorable "climate" for the creation and implementation of climate projects in the EU, the significant price of electricity almost completely negates the benefits of not having to pay significant taxes on sulfur emissions and sales of relatively expensive carbon units. In relation to the EU, the expected reduction in operating costs is an insignificant amount, comparable to the error of the calculation itself, in other cases, the calculation showed a significant increase in the cost of operating costs (up to 46 %). Despite the relatively low cost of a carbon unit in the Russian Federation, in some cases the reduction in operating costs exceeded 20 %, which may be explained by the low price of electricity.

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