BV holistic approach to energy efficiency
Bernard Anne: class must concentrate on keeping things safe
Faced with rising fuel costs and increasing controls on exhaust emissions, against a backcloth of intensified competition, the shipping industry’s quest for new operational efficiencies permeates every sphere of design and practice, writes David Tinsley.
The classification sector has an important role to play in assisting owners to make their ships more energy efficient, considers Bureau Veritas.
“Efficiency has to take on a new meaning,” according to Bernard Anne, managing director of BV’s marine division, writing in the society‘s 2011 Marine Business Review. “To be efficient means more than optimising a ship to burn less fuel when loaded and at its design service speed. It must burn less fuel and cleaner fuel across a wide range of loading conditions and a wide range of speeds,” he said.
“To be efficient means more than saving fuel, it means burning the right fuel in the right place, making a pathway for the use of gas, nuclear and fuel cell solutions. To be efficient means operating the ship in the optimum way for every environmental condition, and that means having crew with the right training, the right support and the right feedback on the operating conditions to make the right judgements,” considered Anne, who related efficiency to the overarching need to operate without incident, breakdown, pollution, and loss of life.
“Class can help with that quest for new levels of efficiency. We can facilitate and act as a catalyst at every level, measuring what happens now, predicting what effect changes will have, injecting knowledge and technical expertise, and sharing development with academics and industry……It is easy to build an underpowered, slow and fuel-efficient ship, but much more difficult to build a safe and fuel-efficient ship. And that is the role of class, at its most basic--to keep things safe,” emphasised Anne.
BV has prepared new guidance on compliance with future IMO-mandated energy efficiency standards, by way of information notes covering certification of the Energy Efficiency Design Index (EEDI) and Ship Energy Efficiency Management Plan (SEEMP), respectively. For owners who wish to go beyond IMO efficiency edicts, the society has developed a new, additional class notation, ‘Energy Efficiency Monitoring’.
This will encompass the energy performance of the ship’s main equipment, including propulsion machinery, generating sets, boilers, propeller, HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) installations, lighting, deck gear and cargo pumps. The notation will cover measurement of operational and ambient data, calculation of the equipment’s actual energy performance, corrections of performance in accordance with standard reference data for sea state, ambient conditions such as sea and air temperatures, and comparisons between original and corrected performance. By such means, the owner may identify and focus on equipment which is not running as it should, with the aim of maximising overall ship efficiency.
BV is participating in the French collaborative research project EONAV, aimed at developing an onboard decision support tool to help reduce vessel energy consumption and emissions.
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