Energy-Saving Technologies

Somewhere in your inbox is a brochure promising double-digit fuel savings from a device you had not heard of a year ago. The market for efficiency hardware is crowded, the percentages are confident, and the physics behind them is rarely on the page. This course puts it back.

We start with a map: the five families of efficiency measures, and the three questions that expose what any savings claim is actually made of. Then the deep dives, two lessons on wind-assisted propulsion, from the Magnus effect to the sea-trial procedure that makes a rotor sail's savings bankable; air lubrication and the compressor arithmetic vendors prefer to skip; the ducts, fins and bulbs that recover the propeller's wasted swirl; the machinery room, where half the fuel's energy never reaches the propeller at all; and shore power, the one measure that works while the ship stands still.

The final lesson is the one the brochures never include: why savings multiply instead of adding, how carbon prices change the payback, and what it takes to verify, not hope, that a measure delivered. By the end you should be able to take any efficiency proposal apart and price what is left.