from ec.europa.eu: "Accession negotiations started in 2005, but until Turkey agrees to apply the Additional Protocol of the Ankara Association Agreement to Cyprus, eight negotiation chapters will not be opened and no chapter will be provisionally closed."
For a European the above statement sounds so strange, alsmost fictional like.
I thought that we have already established that a truly free market does not exist.
Some feedback that will help better understanding of costs.
1. A medium size container vessel (10k TEUS) with abt 15kts speeds will cost the same as the canal transit cost now that the fuel is relatively cheap, compared to the Africa voyage. But you save time.
2. Major liners (APM, MSC, etc), enjoy significant discounts over face value for the canal transits as they commit volumes. The discounts could be north of 30%+, but not publicly available. WILHELMSEN has a nice calculator
3. There is no scenario that something cannot be monetized, either it will be fuel or time or both. As such any financial loss due to the canal clocking can be calculated. The vessel’s P&I will be very busy.
if this ship is purely wind powered and basis on the published info this seems to be the case, i.e. there is no main engine of any type/fuel for propulsion - commercially it’s not viable.
Shipping is highly optimized for arrival to a destination/port on a very narrow time window. Even delays of a couple of hours will be extremely expensive. For example, late arrival to SUEZ means that the vessel will join the end of the convoy at a premium rate costing hundreds of thousands of USD in additional fees. Not only that, Ports and Charterers (Liners) are working basis specific arrival times, you cannot simply arrival late because the wind was not favorable.
It could work as an assisting system, such as Flettner rotors , skysails ,etc
from a European point of view, the market belongs to the people, not Apple and thus they must play by the rules the State set, for and on the behalf of the people.