ING has developed an innovative form of pay per use-based financing to make inland shipping more sustainable. ZES charges ship owners who want to switch to an emission-free energy supply nothing more than the cost of renewable energy consumed, and a rental fee for the battery container.
The financing concept can best be compared to a home energy bill: you pay a fixed charge for the connection, and an additional amount for the energy used.
Until now, this has been different for inland shipping: you need to invest in machinery for energy generation, drives, maintenance, and energy consumption. The innovative aspect of ZES is the fact that you don’t need to invest in the energy carrier (the exchangeable energy container). You simply pay for the amount of energy used and the fixed fee.
ING sees this as an increasingly important instrument for promoting sustainability, because it makes the decision to participate in sustainability accessible to users and helps achieve climate targets more quickly.
It might seem obvious that the bank financing the ship (which may or may not be ING) would also finance adaptation to an electric power train. Since 1 January 2020, ship owners are obliged to comply with the so-called NRMM standard, the European Commission’s Non-Road Mobile Machinery Directive for re-motorisation; for inland shipping this is the STAGE-V standard. At present, ship owners need to make decisions regarding technology. For them, the interchangeable energy container concept is very attractive.
The total cost of ownership of the electric power train is low and thanks to the use of containers for energy supply, other forms of energy, such as hydrogen, can also be used in the future. This eliminates the need to modify the electric power train.