Nowadays, the coastal communities around the world face challenges related to increasing energy consumption, rising energy costs, enchaining of conventional or non-renewable energy resources, climate change, environmental problems, and so on. Therefore, many countries intend to implement different policies to develop clean energy production. There has been a new paradigm in policy from the utilization of greenhouse gases (GHGs), particularly CO2, toward sustainable energy resources to access a high level of security and reliability. This chapter discusses the new trends of hybrid marine power systems and analyzes various sustainable resources, such as PV, tidal turbines, and wind turbines. In addition, the applications of various battery systems to alleviate the randomness and unpredictable features of green energy resources have been studied. In this regard, the capability of various types of energy storage units, such as electrochemical, electromagnetic, and thermal, are presented. The restrictions and opportunities of combining the various technologies in the ship power systems have been investigated from both economic and environmental perspectives. Finally, the energy management problem of two case studies of sero-emissions ferry boats as a promising way to reduce GHGs is presented.
Nowadays, sea traveling is increasing due to its practicality and low-cost. Ferry boats play a significant role in the marine tourism industry to transfer passengers and tourists. Nevertheless, traditional ferry ships consume massive amounts of fossil fuels to generate the required energy for their motors and demanded loads. Also, by consuming fossil fuels, ferries spatter the atmosphere with CO2 emissions and detrimental particles. In order to address these issues, ferry-building industries try to utilize renewable energy sources (RESs) and energy storage systems (ESSs), instead of fossil fuels, to provide the required power in the ferry boats. In general, full-electric ferry (FEF) boats are a new concept to reduce the cost of fossil fuels and air emissions. Hence, FEF can be regarded as a kind of dc stand-alone microgrid with constant power loads (CPLs). This article proposes a new structure of a FEF ship based on RESs and ESSs. In order to solve the negative impedance induced instabilities in dc power electronic based RESs, a new intelligent single input interval type-2 fuzzy logic controller based on sliding mode control is proposed for the dc-dc converters feeding CLPs. The main feature of the suggested technique is that it is mode-free and regulates the plant without requiring the knowledge of converter dynamics. Finally, we conduct a dSPACE-based real-time experiment to examine the effectiveness of the proposed energy management system for FEF vessels.