In recent years, the inland river shipping industry in China has been facing the pressure to comply with ‘low carbon shipping’ policies. Solar energy as one of the most widely used new energy sources has attracted more and more attention in the shipping industry. In 2015, the researchers from Wuhan University of Technology have successfully applied solar energy in an inland river 800PCC (Pure Car Carrier) – ‘Anji204’. The present article described the photovoltaic (PV) generation system which was installed on board the ship and reported the results of actual navigation trials on the testing leg, Yangtze River. On the basis of the collected data, the main research purpose is to evaluate the greenhouse gas (GHG) emission and fuel consumption after introduced solar energy into ship energy system by using Energy Efficiency Design Index (EEDI) analysis. The results show that the ship EEDI reduced from 55.09 g_CO₂/ton·nmile to 52.02 g_CO₂/ton·nmile, decreased by about 5.57%. In addition, it can reduce the fuel consumption by an average about 16 tons per year. Therefore, the utilisation of solar energy in ships can help the inland river shipping industry to meet the ‘low carbon shipping’ policies.

Due to the seriousness of oceanic environmental pollution and the strict restrictions imposed by marine pollution protocol, the photovoltaic (PV) system has been tried to be implemented in traditional ships that use fossil fuel for power generation. This paper investigates the impacts of a large PV system on the ship power system. The installation of PV system of various operation modes on ship power system will significantly affect the power quality of ship grid. In this paper, one practical ship-PV power system of the COSCO TENGFEI vehicle carrier is selected for study. Various power quality issues like the voltage unbalance factor, voltage deviation, frequency deviation, harmonic ratio as well as total harmonic distortion (THD) are investigated and calculated by the calculation methods suggested by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and ship classification societies. The results will be compared with the relative standards to demonstrate the feasibility of the PV system to be installed in the ship power system.