Fewer than one-third of cruise lines docking in Vancouver are connecting to the electrical power grid five years after Port Metro Vancouver made it available to them with economic incentives as a way to reduce diesel emissions and greenhouse gases.

The four of 14 cruise lines (or 29 per cent) using electrical power are Princess Cruises with six ships, Holland America with three, and Celebrity Cruises and Disney Wonder, with one each. Together, they represent 98 (40 per cent) of the 243 total cruise ship calls to Vancouver in 2014.

Those cruise lines not on board with shore-based electrical power are Carnival Cruise Lines, Crystal Cruises, Hapag-Lloyd Cruises, Noble Caledonia, Norwegian Cruise Line, Oceania Cruises, Phoenix Reisen, Regent Seven Seas Cruises, Royal Caribbean International, and Silversea Cruises.

“You have two camps right now, ones that are going shore power and ones that aren’t,” confirmed Greg Wirtz, president of Cruise Lines International Association for North West and Canada. “As a trade association, it’s not for us to dictate to our members what the right thing to do is.”

The port made dockside electrical power available in 2009 — a first for a port in Canada and only the third in the world to do so — thanks to a $9-million program that involved the Canadian and B.C. governments, Princess Cruises, Holland America Line, and BC Hydro.

The port says it has offered eco-friendly shipping lines discounts of up to 47 per cent on harbour fees as an incentive, but that hasn’t been enough.

Cruise lines have been slow to respond to the environmental initiative due to the “substantial capital investment” of retrofitting their cruise ships to handle electrical hookups and because they are busy with bigger environmental issues involving tough new emission standards, Wirtz explained.

He estimated the electrical hook up costs about $1 million a ship, money that the cruise line won’t recoup despite the reduced harbour dues (amounting to $4,000 to $5,000 for a large ship on a single call) and the lower cost of electricity during the eight to nine hours as ship is plugged in while docked in Vancouver.

“You’re never going to make enough to offset the capital investment,” he said.

Meanwhile, under the North American Emission Control Area, ships have a final deadline of Jan. 1, 2015, to reduce the sulphur content of their fuel to 0.1 per cent “or employ technology that is equally as effective or better,” Wirtz said.

Due to that deadline, the big push is for technology that uses sea-water scrubbers to remove sulphur and particulates from the ship’s diesel exhaust, he said, noting the pollutants are then filtered out before the water is returned to the ocean.

People who look at a cruise ship’s smokestack in the near future will see “a very clean emission, kind of like the tail pipe of a car,” he said.

Carnival Corporation, which owns about half the global cruise capacity, including Princess Cruises and Holland America Line, has announced it is spending a total of $400 million to do the necessary retrofitting on 100 cruise ships, he said. “It’s a big step forward for the industry.”

Cruise ships visiting Vancouver can carry up to about 4,500 passengers and crew, equivalent to a small town tying up at dock.

According to a port EcoAction brochure, the electrical hook-up program for cruise ships is eliminating 3,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases, the equivalent of “taking 770 cars off the road for a year.” It calls the program a “highly effective way” for docked cruise ships to “shut down their engines and plug into the city’s electrical grid to run all on board services.”

Other environmental measures being employed on cruise ships include the use of LED lighting, more efficient propulsion systems, improved ship designs and coatings, and economies of scale by putting more passengers on larger ships, Wirtz noted.

lpynn@vancouversun

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