Decades ago a rusting cargo ship near New England began sending power ashore from one converted hold, and it kept the lights on for over a decade
A rusting cargo hull sits tied to a New England pier, its hold gutted and packed with turbines instead of coal or timber.
No engineer on the dock that year thought the ship would ever sail again.
It was never going to carry cargo.
By the 1990s, major manufacturers including Westinghouse and Wärtsilä started building floating power barges as a way to provide energy to developing nations.
It was going to carry current.
And for over a decade, it did exactly that, from a berth most residents barely noticed.
The ship had a name, the SS Jacona, and a job nobody had given a cargo vessel before.
How do you turn a ship’s hold into a power station
The trick was never exotic. Strip a working steamship of its cargo gear, bolt in turbo generators and boilers, and run heavy cable from the hull to onshore switchgear.
The hull itself did the rest, floating the entire plant on water instead of pouring a foundation on land. That distinction mattered more than it sounds.
A floating power plant needs no site acquisition, no land survey, no permanent concrete pour, because the vessel is already a complete structure the moment it is moored. Tow it in, hook up the cables, and the hold starts making electricity.
So the Jacona’s conversion was less invention than substitution. Coastal communities along the northeast tip of the United States got temporary generating capacity without anyone laying a new foundation, and a scrapped cargo hull got a second working life it was never built for.
What the ship actually looked like doing the job
Picture the scene at low tide: a gray hull riding at anchor, no cargo booms swinging, just a steady hum rolling off the deck and thick cable snaking from the stern to a shore terminal.
The ship barely moved. It did not need to, because inside, the old cargo holds that once carried freight now held the working guts of a power station.
The converted cargo ship drew its fuel the same way any coal or oil fired plant of the era did, but it answered to tide tables and mooring lines instead of a fixed address.
That mobility was the entire point. If a town’s demand spiked, or a plant on land went down for repair, the Jacona’s owners could reposition the whole generating asset along the coast, something no fixed power source of the era could do.
The record behind the claim, and where it comes from
The documented account comes from maritime and energy historians tracing the lineage of what the industry now calls power barges and power ships. Writing in The Conversation, researchers note that in 1931 the cargo ship was converted into a floating power plant, describing it as the first vessel of its kind, supplying energy to coastal communities along the northeast tip of the United States.
That single conversion opened a template the industry quietly kept using for decades. After the Second World War, the same logic reappeared on a larger scale, as the converted WWII oil tanker USS Saranac grew into a bigger generating platform.
By the 1990s, major manufacturers including Westinghouse and Wärtsilä started building floating power barges as a way to provide energy to developing nations. None of that would have happened the way it did without a rusting freighter in a New England harbor proving the basic idea first.
Where this idea still struggles today
The complication is that a floating plant is only ever as good as what fuels it, and the Jacona’s generation came from burning fuel oil, the same carbon heavy approach that modern power ships still default to.
Researchers describe modern power ships as vessels often converted from single hull bulk carriers, fitted with a large power plant that typically generates electricity from natural gas or hydrocarbons such as heavy oil.
So the mobility that made the Jacona valuable is still paired, in most of today’s fleet, with the same combustion it had in its own era. The hull changed almost nothing about the fuel question, only where the fuel got burned.
Newer variants are trying to break that link. Solar power barges, fitted with panels and batteries rather than boilers, are proving particularly useful in river or remote coastal communities, such as Maine, where they can supply power for near shore fishing activities including aquaculture and oyster farming.
What a decades old cargo hull still has to teach a grid under strain
The open question is whether the Jacona’s real legacy is the hull or the habit. Grid planners today reach for floating generation for the same reason New England did nearly a century ago: speed.
A moored vessel can be delivering power in weeks, while a plant on land with comparable output can take years to permit and build. That gap still shows up wherever storm recovery or island demand outruns the wires reaching it, much like the pumped storage systems that now move water instead of fuel, including Colorado’s Flatiron turbine.
Even so, nobody should mistake the Jacona for a clean energy story. It solved a delivery problem, not an emissions one, and the fuel oil era it represents is exactly what today’s floating solar and battery barges are trying to replace, in roughly the same way reversible turbines at Missouri’s Taum Sauk replaced one kind of generation with another.
What the old freighter proved, and what still holds, is that a hull built for one cargo can carry an entirely different one. New England’s coast got a decade of light from a ship nobody expected to generate anything at all, and that stubborn, improvised usefulness is still being rediscovered, afloat, every time a coastline needs power faster than the land can give it.
Hugo is an engineer with strong technical expertise. Multilingual from an early age, his writing combines technical clarity with a strong interest in science and energy.
