Abstract:

This paper presents a proposal of energy audit developed for the Polish fishing fleet at the Baltic sea. Now days with the high fuel prices and slack freight market, every ship-owner is seeking ways to save money and to keep his enterprise in profit. Apart from the energy recovery systems, fishing vessels have been incorporated latest technologies to reduce energy consumption and to make ships greener. A research team of the Maritime University of Szczecin gathered opinions of the shipowners regarding the effects of the modernizations performed and conducted research which shall constitute the grounds to develop optimal directions for modernization and operation of the fishing vessels. Development of energy efficiency audit programme, dedicated for this specific vessels’ group, will be practical to improve energy efficiency during fishing vessels’ operation. The idea to carry out an audit is to identify solutions , which would reduce energy inputs for vessels’ operation, and present them to fishermen starting from the simplest ones which do not require funding to more complex requiring considerable financial investment, but improving significantly the energy efficiency of vessels as well as the consequent competitiveness.

Keywords: energy efficiency audit, fishing cutters