By Maria Gallucci, Canary Media, April 9, 2024
With their roaring diesel engines, tugboats push, pull, and guide much larger vessels into port and out to sea. They are small but mighty — and incredibly dirty, spewing huge amounts of toxic exhaust and planet-warming emissions every year.
Now, however, the humble harbor craft is going electric.
America’s first fully battery-powered tugboat recently docked at the Port of San Diego, where officials are working to decarbonize tugs, diesel cranes, and trucks. The electric tug was built over three years at an Alabama shipyard and then moved through the Panama Canal before arriving in Southern California earlier this spring.
“We’re ecstatic,” Frank Urtasun, the port’s chairman, told Canary Media. “This electric tugboat is a real game-changer that I think will have ramifications across the country.”
The 82-foot-long vessel is set to begin operating within the coming weeks, as soon as the shoreside charging infrastructure is completed, said Crowley. The Florida-based company owns and operates the electric boat — named “eWolf” in honor of Crowley’s first tug, the 1965 Seawolf — and everything that’s needed to keep it running.
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