Start of solar mailboat on the Spree in autumn at the latest

From this autumn at the latest, Deutsche Post plans to transport parcels across the Spree to the districts using a special solar-powered ship - possibly as early as this summer.

Talks with the districts are still ongoing, the company told the Deutsche Presse-Agentur. Among other things, the necessary infrastructure for loading and unloading the ships has to be created at the landing stages. "We plan to initially deploy at least one solar-powered ship on the Spree," it said. "The starting point will be Berlin's Westhafen."

Start with comparatively small volume of packages

The extent to which parcels can be delivered in this way remains to be seen. "Measured against the total daily volume, however, it will be comparatively small quantities at the beginning," the Post simply announced. The plans for a solar-powered postal ship had already become known in mid-May. Deliveries will be reloaded onto transport vehicles and distributed from the moorings.

Hope for autonomous, electrically powered ships in the future

The project is part of a joint research project in which the Technische Universität Berlin (TU) is also involved. "In metropolitan regions with an existing waterway infrastructure with low capacity utilisation, the transport mode ship usually offers massive free capacities for shifting freight traffic from the congested roads to the water," it says in this regard. According to Post, the vision is to eventually also use autonomous, electrically powered ships.