HVAC was singled out in Carnival Corp’s sustainability report. Pictured: Carnival Jubilee (source: Carnival Cruise Line)
Operators Carnival Corp and MSC Cruises highlight their HVAC strategies
Cruise operators are upgrading their HVAC systems to be as energy efficient as possible.
Carnival Corp chief maritime officer William Burke highlighted the importance of HVAC systems when he unveiled the cruise company’s 2023 Sustainability Report at Seatrade Cruise Global.
“We are working hard on energy efficiency. It is great to get a new ship that is so much better but when you have more than 90 [in the current fleet] you have to do something with the rest of them.”
To this end, the company has launched a ‘service power package’ which aims to boost energy efficiency across a few platforms in the current fleet. This includes installing LED lights around the fleet, adding a dimming capacity, and upgrading HVAC.
Mr Burke says, “Technology keeps improving, so we are upgrading the technology of our HVAC – and HVAC is more than air conditioning, it is all the fans in a ship, all the ventilation – and this is a key one. If you think of a hotel room and its fan has two or three speeds, that is better than ‘on’ or ‘off’, but what we are doing with variable frequency drives is to set the fan speed at the speed we need, so that it runs at a constant speed, and not just on/off. If you have an on and off, you use a lot of power but with a constant speed, you are saving a lot of energy.
“We do the same thing with our pumps. Some of these pumps are huge. When you run a pump, you want that to run at an optimal speed, and so we are adjusting all those. That is going to be significant to us because when we complete the fleet it will drop our absolute emissions by 5%, which is a pretty significant change.”
Over at MSC Cruises, energy efficiency is also a key part of the company’s decarbonisation journey, and MSC Cruises chief energy transition officer Michel Francioni singles out air conditioning as being a major factor (for more, see our interview with Mr Francioni on pages 10-16).
“These involve several megawatts of consumption; in general, cruise ships are very complex pieces of equipment which use a lot of energy. When in port, large cruise ships could use around 9-10 MWh but at sea up to 40 or 50 MWh.”
In its efforts to boost energy efficiency, MSC Cruises has developed advanced software to control and analyse the performance of each ship with thousands of onboard data points collected every five minutes.
Mr Francioni says digitalisation is a key factor when it comes to the way in which the company operates the ship. “Our fleet is continuously monitoring energy demand – every small piece of equipment is connected, and we know exactly how much energy we can save. If we go below a certain range, we intervene. There is continuous interaction with crew to make sure the ship is operated at the highest possible level given the conditions it is in.”
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