Cruise Ships Plug In on Shore

Cruise Ships in Brooklyn to Plug In on Shore

The mighty Queen Mary 2 will no longer be running its engines when it docks at the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal next year. Instead, the cruise ship will shut its engines and plug into a giant electrical outlet built especially for the port.

Bloomberg administration is set to announce today 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, the officials said.

The question 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 New York Power Authority, which provides power for the cruise terminal.

Ultimately, the city, state and private sector came to a tentative agreement. The state’s Public Service Commission negotiated a competitive rate, and the Economic Development Corporation, which manages the city’s cruise terminals, 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 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.

Though commonly known as shore power, the process of shutting down diesel power and relying on the local electrical grid to power a ship is known in the maritime industry as “cold ironing.”

Electrical power is now used at cruise terminals in Vancouver, Seattle, San Francisco and San Diego and Los Angeles. The Brooklyn Cruise Terminal is smaller than most of these ports, but if shore power works there, officials might consider introducing it at the larger Manhattan Cruise Terminal.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey spent $12 million to upgrade the infrastructure at the Brooklyn port, which it owns. The project also received a $2.9 million grant from the federal Environmental Protection Agency, as part of federal stimulus funds.

Plugging in to an alternative hydroelectric source at the Red Hook port would eliminate locally, some carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide, which can come from the ships running engines.

It should be an improvement in air quality around the New York port.