Australia Just Built the World's Biggest Electric Ship

In a shipyard on the River Derwent in Hobart, Tasmania, Incat has built the China Zorrilla, a 130 metre battery electric catamaran ferry for Buquebus that carries 2,100 passengers and 225 vehicles and burns no fuel at all, running on more than 250 tonnes of batteries and over 40 megawatt hours of storage, which its builder says is four times larger than any ship battery installed before. This video tells the whole story: why physics said a fast battery ship this size was impossible, how Robert Clifford's light aluminium catamarans turned the weight trap into a loop that works, how the order for Hull 096 changed from LNG and diesel to batteries in January 2023, the four fire-separated battery rooms, the eight Wartsila water jets, the first power-up on 14 December 2025 and the battery-only sea trials on the Derwent in January 2026. Then the project nearly came off the rails: the conflict that closed the Strait of Hormuz trapped the heavy-lift ship Black Marlin in the Persian Gulf, so the world's biggest battery ship sat in Hobart waiting for a ride, until it was floated aboard at the end of July 2026, carried around 15,000 kilometres through the Strait of Magellan to Uruguay, floated free at Nueva Palmira and christened in Buenos Aires on 21 October 2026. We look honestly at the limits too: about 90 minutes of running time, the charging time nobody agrees on, the reported 200 million US dollar price including both terminals, battery wear and fire safety, and what Molslinjen's three Hobart-built ferries for Denmark and Incat's expansion mean for Australian manufacturing and fuel security. If you want more stories about Australian machines changing how the country moves, subscribe, and tell me in the comments whether you would ride this ferry in its very first week or wait a year to see how the batteries hold up.