California Will Become First State Requiring Electric Marine Vessels

In 2007, the California Air Resources Board adopted Commercial Harbor Craft regulations that required certain classes of commercial marine vessels to upgrade their diesel engines to cleaner diesel engines.

In order to make the reduction of emissions easier, California created the Carl Moyer Program that provides funding based on the amount of emissions reduced.

California has now proposed an update to the Commercial Harbor Craft regulations that will require the following two categories of vessels to adopt zero-emission technology:

• New excursion vessels (sunset cruises, whale watching, etc) will be required to be zero-emission capable hybrid and 30% of their power must be derived from zero-emission sources by January 1, 2025
• New and in-use short-run (less than 3 nautical miles) ferries will be required to be zero-emission by January 1, 2026

Beyond these two vessel categories, the emissions requirements for all vessels are increasing. In most cases, after factoring in Moyer funding, the five year cost of ownership, including the purchase of an electric propulsion system and conversion of a vessel to diesel to electric, costs less than repowering to cleaner diesel engines.

For more information, you can read the proposed Commercial Harbor Craft regulations  or look at the presentation given in March of 2021 given at a public workshop.  

Commercial vessel operators in California can contact Green Yachts to find out more about how going electric is a more cost-effective strategy to meet California's emission requirements.

Green Yachts will be electrifying the first short-run ferry in California in early 2022 in partnership with EPTechnologies with safer batteries than have been used to date on any commercial electric/hybrid system installed in the United States as the batteries not only have batteries that monitor state of charge at the cell level (a very important battery safety feature above and beyond US Coast Guard safety requirements), but they also have a temperature activated fire retardant release system built into every battery. 

Green Yachts is proud to be based in California and be part of California's effort to electrify commercial vessels and reduce our emissions from the marine sector.