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‘Greenwashing’ cruise ships fail to use shore power in UK ports [1]
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Date: 2023-11
The failure to use shore power can partly be explained by cruise lines delaying the necessary investment to upgrade their ships to be compatible with the energy source.
Only 46% of cruise ships globally can connect to shore power, according to CLIA – despite the first shore power port connection for cruise ships being installed more than 20 years ago. CLIA says 72% of ships will be able to do so by 2028.
Carnival admitted that the Iona, Ventura and Queen Victoria, which visited Southampton 80 times between May 2022 and February 2023, were not capable of taking shore power in that period.
Yet even cruise ships that can use the electricity regularly fail to do so in Southampton.
The cruise company AIDA, which is owned by Carnival, said in 2021 that the use of shore power “is a decisive step for AIDA cruises to reduce local emissions to zero during berthing over time, as a cruise ship typically stays in port around 40% of its operating time”.
AIDA has also claimed to be “campaigning for the development” of shore power infrastructure at other ports.
But the company’s flagship vessel, the AIDAprima, did not connect to shore power in Southampton on 80% of its visits, despite being able to do so, according to ABP data from May 2022 to February 2023 obtained by openDemocracy.
Katherine Barbour, who became Southampton’s first Green councillor in May, said: “One only has to look at the plume of smoke coming up from the cruise liners to see the pollution that is being discharged over our city.”
A spokesperson for Carnival said: “Our ships leverage shore power whenever possible where available at our destinations.”
‘Greenwashing’
Southampton port owner ABP successfully applied in 2020 for a £4.4m public subsidy to install shore power.
In its business case for the grant – which was awarded via the Solent Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP), a voluntary partnership between the local authority and businesses to encourage economic growth in the area – ABP stated that cruise ships were at berth for an average of 12 hours and could plug in for “96% of time in port”.
But figures published in Solent LEP’s annual report suggest that the 55 ships that used shore power in Southampton in the 12 months to the end of March 2023 did so for an average of only five and a half hours, spending the remaining six hours in port burning fossil fuel to generate power. A cruise ship consumes an average of 2,700 litres of diesel an hour in port.
The report stated that the 55 ships used shore power to draw a total of 1.5 million kilowatt hours of electricity. One large cruise ship is likely to use at least this amount of energy in less than two weeks.
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/cruise-ships-greenwashing-energy-shore-power-diesel-uk-ports-mislead-tourists/
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