The IWSA Secretary General spent much of December travelling through North East and South East Asia attending MARINTEC in Shanghai, presenting at seminars in China and South Korea and having extensive meetings in Japan and Singapore. Here he shares some of his reflections on those three weeks.

Reflections from Asia

I have spent the last three weeks travelling through Asia (China, Japan, South Korea and Singapore) having hundreds of conversations, 20+ meetings with shipowners, shipyards, ports and wind OEMs. I have helped deliver the wind message at a handful of seminars and visited a number of wind propulsion development companies and projects along the way.

Every day is a learning day, and here are three things that I have been very impressed by during my travels:

🔑 Wind as a key strategic sector
Throughout my trip this message has been reinforced, whether there is a global #decarbonisation framework in place next year or not, the IMO and the #shippingindustry has a net zero strategy in place and #windpropulsion is going to be vital pillar in delivering on that. That was really heartening to hear and of course aligns with our mission and messaging too.

📈 Scalability and speed
The speed of development in the wind propulsion segment in Asian regions doesn’t always make headlines, in the past much of the media oxygen has been taken up with breathless treatise expounding on new ‘fuel’ development. However, that has masked a rapid development that continues unabated. There is a pragmatic mind set that was evident at every turn, searching out today and near future solutions and finding ways to nurture and grow. Production capacity is growing both from domestic producers and international tie ups, with current capacity in China alone reaching 500+ units per year. We had the official launch of a CSSC-SDARI rotor sail product during Marintec China and I visited the testing facilities for a Hanwha Ocean rotor sail to be first deployed on a LNG carrier in the next year or so. Yard experience for installations is growing too so these economies of scale and learning curve are bringing costs and lead times down.

🏫 Knowledge dissemination
Thus, there is growing dissemination of technical information and the foundations in place for the dissemination of the technology but one question was asked quite regularly – When will more publicly released data be available to grow the market?
I had many discussions about that and found once we drilled down a little further a similar issue with other markets. Widespread performance data is required but that is needed mainly by later adopters who are sceptical of new systems rather than customers who have done the due diligence themselves and then made early commercial decisions to buy.
It is recognised that the data flow is improving and will take a leap forward once that data can be further aggregated and anonymised which will naturally start to take place with 100-200 ships in operation with wind over the coming 12-18 months.

This is quite clearly understood by the Asian maritime stakeholders I met with but there is also an eagerness, an excitement and daresay an impatience to move forward at pace and accelerate towards a wind propelled future for ships and shipping – Bravo!!!