Wasaline’s Aurora Botnia Slated for Biggest Ever Battery Retrofit
Finnish ship owner Wasaline is partnering with marine battery manufacturer AYK Energy to undertake the biggest battery retrofit so far carried out on a vessel. Built in 2021, Aurora Botnia which was already billed as one of the most efficient vessels will add a new battery system nearly five times as powerful as its current system and which is expected to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by approximately a quarter.
Built at Rauma Marine Constructions, the hybrid ROPAX Ferry Aurora Botnia entered service in August 2021 equipped with dual-fuel engines and batteries. It uses LNG, biogas, and batteries for the propulsion on its daily runs between Vaasa in Finland and Umeå in Sweden.
“There’s growing demand for environmentally friendly transport, and intermodal cargo transportation from Europe is increasing yearly,” said Peter Ståhlberg, Managing Director of Wasaline. “Expanding our battery capacity is a major step that allows us to make our vessel even more sustainable and allocate more capacity to batteries and biogas.”
AYK Energy reports it will build the new system at its manufacturing plant in China and it will be ready for installation on the ferry later this year. The project will take place at the end of 2025 at the Turku Repair Yard in Finland and Aurora Botnia will return to service in January 2026.
The hybrid vessel is equipped with dual-fuel engines and currently has 2.2 MWh batteries. It uses electric-powered Azimuth thrusters. The new battery system will have a capacity of 10.4 MWh. According to the companies, the new system will slash fossil energy use by around 10,000 MWh annually.
“This is the largest battery retrofit on a vessel to date, and we are extremely proud to be partnering with Wasaline as the provider of this advanced battery solution,” said Chris Kruger, Founder and President at AYK Energy. “AYK’s battery systems are built around safety. We are one of the few manufacturers to exclusively use LFP and have developed a system where the LFP chemistry is safer and has comparable energy density to NMC.”
He explains this project will exceed the previous biggest marine battery retrofit on the AIDAPrima cruise ship by about 500kWh. It is the next step in the fast-growing sector with AYK saying it is seeing a surge in demand for its batteries across the maritime industry. The manufacturer is supplying battery systems to tugs, OSVs, superyachts, fishing vessels, work boats, and even large container vessels as part of their power mix. AYK recently struck a deal to supply a 6MWh battery for the world’s first battery-methanol tug being built for Svitzer.
AYK this year successfully installed the biggest marine battery systems ever built, two 12 megawatt-hour (MWh) Orion+ batteries for Brittany Ferries hybrid electric vessels the Guillaume de Normandie and its sister ship Saint-Malo. The vessels were built at China Merchants Jinling Shipyard Weihai.