Marine Electrification

Electrifying a ship is not the same as electrifying a truck with a bigger battery. Much of today’s charging hardware was designed for the road and industrial sites, which stops being applicable for marine conditions.

Start with the ground. A land charger sits on one shared earth that everything around it agrees on. Plug it into a ship and two electrical worlds meet: the port’s earthing system, and the vessel’s — deliberately kept isolated from its hull. The cable’s protective earth bonds them for safety, but you don’t want to weld them together, or tie a shore ground hard to a hull in sea water and you invite stray current, corrosion, and ground loops. Galvanic isolation is what keeps the peace, letting the shore deliver megawatts while holding two grounding worlds apart, so a fault on one side stays there and doesn’t disrupt the other.

Then there is what happens when a fault does occur. A traditional mains frequency transformer can only experience the issue and hope to endure it, but not actively control it. A high-frequency Silicon Carbide converter can sense the fault and actively limit the current within microseconds. At sea, where safety margins are tight and repairs are not a quick call-out, controlling a fault beats merely withstanding one.

Another problem is ensuring reliability. The charger and the vessel must talk constantly throughout the charging session, and that link is delicate by nature. Anything the power converter does electrically can disturb this link. Fast switching converters generate noise. In port environments, where cables are long and power levels are very high, such interference can interrupt communication between the charger and the vessel, leading to sessions dropping randomly.

For years the power hardware underneath was never built for any of this, so the marine world worked around it, and players started inventing their own charging schemes to fit the constraints with the available modules at the time.

ADVANTICS builds power modules from the ground up for marine’s real demands. High power, galvanic isolation, liquid cooling, and the robustness a system on a port needs.

ADVANTICS provides the custom support necessary to ensure a seamless deployment of the MCS charging solution. Our liquid-cooled power converters are engineered to withstand rugged environments like marine, including high temperatures, dust, and corrosive salt-laden air, while delivering reliable performance. Our charge controller technology, notably ADM-CS-SPCC and ADM-CS-MEVC, was the first in the open market to support megawatt charging applications for the heavy-duty transportation and marine sector.

Enabling electrification in marine ports is crucial and effective because users are concentrated, throughput is predictable, and the emissions reduction is high. The International Maritime Organisation is striving for a 20-30% reduction in shipping emissions by 2030. The growing adoption of electric straddles with MCS capabilities in marine ports is a milestone, significantly enabling faster port operations and increased fleet availability due to reduced charging times. 

We are proud to help shape the next generation of sustainable, high-capacity port operations.