The August 20^th Sunday Seattle Times ran a front-page article that asks why the Washington State Ferry System isn’t building new ferries to replace the aging boats that are due (or past due) for retirement. With a fleet that includes four ferries that have been in service for more than fifty years, and seven others that have been in service for more than forty years, the need to renew the fleet is increasingly urgent. Just this morning the ferry Chelan was taken out of service due to mechanical problems leaving the San Juans service short one boat.    

The Times article focuses on negotiations with Vigor Industries. Vigor operates the shipyard on Harbor Island where most of the WSF fleet has been built, including the four diesel-powered Olympic Class ferries that are the most recent additions to the WSF fleet. In 2018 Vigor was prepared to build up to five more Olympic Class ferries under an existing contract. Had WSF exercised that contract at least two of those new ferries would already have been added to the fleet (and at a price hundreds of millions of dollars less than the hybrid-electric ferries WSF is now hoping to acquire).

Why didn’t WSF and Vigor move forward with that contract?  The reason is Governor Inslee issued an Executive Order that directed the Ferry System to accelerate the transition to a zero-emissions fleet. That set in motion the next four years of planning, design work, and negotiations with Vigor over the design and price of hybrid-electric ferries to satisfy the Governor’s directive. By late 2021 it was apparent the hybrid-electric design was costly, heavy, and entailed greater risk that Vigor was unwilling to accept. Vigor’s bid, reportedly $400 million per boat, was far above the approximately $225 million per ferry WSF had paid just a few years earlier for the diesel-powered Olympic Class, and far above the budget the legislature had provided. That high cost also does not include the tens of millions of dollars needed to install specially designed charging equipment at the terminals. 

After failing to reach agreement with Vigor, WSF now plans to issue a new Request for Proposals open to shipyards outside Washington State (but still within the U.S.). With luck that will yield more competitive bids, but few shipyards in the U.S. have experience with complex hybrid-electric propulsion systems so nobody should bet on WSF snagging a bargain. Early next year WSF will have received the bids. Then it will be up to the legislature to decide whether to proceed. If the price and delivery schedule is unacceptable they may want to reconsider whether hybrid-electric propulsion is such a good idea. Reducing GHG emissions is a commendable objective, but in the case of renewing the WSF fleet it will come at a very high cost. WSF does burn a lot of diesel fuel, about seventeen million gallons in 2020, but total diesel fuel consumption in Washington State is over a billion gallons per year, so the hybrid-electric fleet additions covered under the contract would only reduce the State’s GHG emissions by a small fraction of one percent.  

In the meantime, WSF will be challenged to keep their elderly fleet in operation. Unplanned service interruptions and reductions, such as have become all-too common the last few years, can be expected through 2028 if not longer. That has become an unacknowledged cost of the Governor’s directive to transition to a zero-emissions fleet.