Shore-side electricity (shore power) is an essential step to the minimization of emissions at berth of ships, but its engineering viability is determined by variety across ports because of vessel mix, turnaround, traffic density and energy infrastructure. This paper gives a comparative engineering evaluation of the green shore power supply under a limited energy- envelope by basing solely on the openly available data on the operations of the ports. Three large Indian ports which are typological representations of varying modes of operation: container-based, bulk, and diversified are examined. With literature reported ranges of auxiliary power demand, average vessel turnaround times are added together to form indicative per-call shore power energy envelopes without the use of proprietary vessel load data.
The findings demonstrate that container hubs have a comparably low per-call energy demand (around 44-112 MWh per vessel call), which is caused by short berthing times, but a large aggregate annual demand caused by vessel calls. Conversely, bulk- and tanker-dominated ports have significantly more energy demand per call (around 70-360 MWh per call), due to relatively long berthing times, whereas diversified ports demand flexible and modular solutions, to support the heterogeneous profile of vessels. Electrical infrastructure analysis suggests that ports that have a high-voltage grid redundancy and large renewable energy infiltration are in a more advantageous situation to adopt low-carbon shore power at scale.