Cruise Ships in Brooklyn Going Green – Plugs In on Shore

Jun 2, 2011

After about two years of negotiations, the Bloomberg administration announced recently a multiagency agreement to supply cruise ships with “shore power,” The Brooklyn terminal will become the first on the East Coast to adopt the cleaner technology.

Advocates for the environment, who have staged protests and lobbied since 2006, hope the pending agreement will rid the waterfront community of a veil of haze and what they contend are associated health risks.

There has been little controversy about the merits of reducing pollution, mostly sulphuric gases, from cruise ships idling in port.  The debate raged, however, over who should foot the bill. Electricity for a 3,000-passenger cruise ship the size of four football fields was not exactly on the rate card for the NYC Power Authority, which provides power for the cruise terminal.  But ultimately, the city, state and private sector came to a tentative agreement. and the Economic Development Corp  agreed to subsidize some of the cost of the power, as did the power authority.

Under the five-year agreement, Carnival Cruise Lines, which owns the Queen Mary 2, will pay 12 cents per kilowatt hour, while the city economic agency and the power authority will divide the remaining 16 cents, according to one official with knowledge of the deal.  Carnival will also have to pay $4 million to retrofit its two ships that use the port — the Queen Mary 2 and the Caribbean Princess. The two ships dock in Brooklyn a total of 40 times a year.

For the cruise line, the deal may cost about $1.7 million more than using the diesel generators that now operate at the port. But the company has already embraced the technology, introducing it 10 years ago in Juneau, Alaska.  Electrical power is now used at cruise terminals in Vancouver, Seattle, San Francisco and San Diego and Los Angeles.

A large cruise ship burning diesel emits more than 1,600 tons of air pollutants annually, according to an environmental impact study conducted as part of the project to switch from diesel to electricity.  Plugging in to an alternative hydroelectric source would eliminate nearly 1,500 tons of carbon dioxide, 95 tons of nitrous oxide and 6.5 tons of diesel particulate matter annually.  Just from the shore powering of these two ships, it will be the equivalent of removing 5,000 cars per year from the road.”