Preliminary Technoeconomical Evaluation of Cold Ironing

In the context of reducing air pollution in ports, which are often located in the urban environment of cities, such as the port of Piraeus or Thessaloniki in Greece, the European Directive 2014/94/EU requires the application of Cold Ironing in the shipping sector until the end of 2025. That is, the berthed ships need to be supplied by the electricity system of the port, turning off the operation of their thermal electrical power units. A key question that arises is whether the application of cold ironing is economically viable for various types of ships and under what conditions, without subsidy. In this article, a method for estimating the economic viability of connecting ships to the port network by simply ignoring the network constraints (assuming the availability of an infinite bus) is presented. The proposed method is applied to cruise ships, containerships, and bulk carriers, indicative for the port of Thessaloniki, incorporating standard Medium Voltage (MV) tariffs of the Greek electricity system, determining the allowable corrected annual construction & maintenance cost of a Cold Ironing (CI) investment.