When does onshore power supply reduce CO₂? A threshold model for the European cargo fleet under IMO 2050 targets

Details

Supervisors

Agrell, Per Joakim ; Herrera Rodriguez, Manuel

Faculty

Louvain School of Management

Degree label

Master [120] : ingénieur de gestion, à finalité spécialisée

Abstract

International shipping accounts for about 2.9% of global CO₂ emissions from human activity, and much of the pollution that goes with it is concentrated in ports, where berthed ships run auxiliary engines to power their systems. Onshore power supply lets a berthed ship switch those engines off and draw electricity from the quay instead. From 2030, FuelEU Maritime requires containerships and passenger ships above 5 000 gross tonnage to connect in the main European ports. Connecting a ship does not eliminate the emissions it would have produced. It relocates them. This thesis asks under what circumstances that relocation reduces net CO₂ for the European cargo fleet, and when it does not. The model is deterministic and anchored on the verified at-berth emissions of 10 601 cargo vessels reported under EU-MRV for 2024. Every parameter is either measured, taken from a citable source, or swept across a published range; none is fixed at a convenient value. Three conditions must hold at once. The shore electricity must be cleaner per unit of energy than the fuel it replaces, which places the break-even between 429 and 701 gCO₂/kWh depending on the fuel and build era of the auxiliary engine. The call must be long enough to absorb the time spent connecting and disconnecting, which sets a minimum viable duration of 2.25 hours on the European average grid. And the berth must not be so heavily used that this added time pushes vessels into anchorage waiting: beyond roughly 80% berth utilisation the balance turns negative, and mandatory connection at a saturated terminal raises fleet emissions instead of lowering them. The three conditions tighten together rather than trading off, so shore power is most effective on the vessels that have done least to decarbonise their own generation, calling at length in uncongested berths on clean grids. The two-hour exemption boundary in the regulation is correctly placed at exactly one value of the connection overhead, 80 minutes, and no public source measures that quantity.