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Ice-going performance prediction and voyage planning of electric ships operated between Norrland and southern Sweden


Ice-going performance prediction and voyage planning of electric ships operated between Norrland and southern Sweden

16 January 2026

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In this report, we analyse the effects of operation in ice on yearly costs and yearly emissions of greenhouse gases for a 4 000 DWT container feeder (ELINORR) working the route between the ports of Södertälje and Skellefteå in Sweden. We are also studying how the operation in ice affects the risks for delays. The analysis is performed for three different types of ice years: mild, normal, and severe. The definitions of these ice year types follow the terminology and definitions used by, e.g., the Swedish Maritime Administration (SMA), and we use the yearly published ice reports as a base for the relative occurrence of the different ice year types (Publikationer - sammanfattning av isvintrarna, 2024). In addition, this project developed methodologies to predict the ice-going performance of electric ships for the Skellefteå–Södertälje route in Scania’s supply chain. While the container feeder concept ELINORR, designed in the cooperation project Elektrifierad sjötransport Norrland–Södertälje (Rogerson et al., 2025), had been proposed, its ice-going capacity and additional energy demand for winter operations had not been assessed. Our study introduced numerical methods and simulation tools that incorporate realistic environmental loads and common Baltic Sea ice types, enabling predictions of ship performance, energy consumption, voyage time, economic costs, and emissions. Simulations show that ELINORR's energy system can handle the investigated ice conditions, though gensets are required in severe ice, where speed reduction may also cause delays. Battery sizing analysis indicates that the 5-container pack is insufficient to give 100% operation on shore electricity, even for ice-free voyages, while the 15-container pack offers little advantage over the 10-container pack except in rare severe ice scenarios. Thus, the 10-container battery pack configuration is suggested as the largest suitable amount of batteries to be carried. 


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