Toward Future Green Maritime Transportation: An Overview of Seaport Microgrids and All-Electric Ships

Nowadays, extensive electrification of maritime transportation, represented by the seaport microgrids and all-electric ships (AESs), has been viewed as a feasible route to enhance the overall system flexibility as well as to mitigate the resulted in growing environmental issues. However, with the trend of electrification, the connections between the seaport and ships are no longer limited in the logistic-side, but also expanded to the electric-side, which makes the future maritime transportation management as a complex transportation-power multi-microgrid coordination problem. In land-based applications, multi-microgrid coordination is a relatively mature technology and already brings enormous economic and environmental benefits, but there still exists some gaps before those land-based technologies being integrated into maritime applications. In this perspective, this overview study emphasizes the characteristic of seaport microgrid and AESs, then several emerging technical challenges and the future research prospects are raised after a comprehensive literature survey.