by Tom Banse, Washington State Standard
July 10, 2025
Washington’s first plug-in ferry will begin shuttling cars and passengers across Puget Sound by the end of next week.
Gov. Bob Ferguson made the announcement Thursday during a celebratory demonstration lap around Elliot Bay on the ferry Wenatchee, concluding a challenging conversion to hybrid-electric propulsion over the past 22 months.
Ferguson walked on board with his predecessor, Jay Inslee, who appeared in a particularly good mood. Inslee championed the electrification and decarbonization plans of the state ferry system during his three terms as governor. The debut of the overhauled Wenatchee is the first tangible result that taxpayers and commuters can ride.
“Washington state is a great visionary state. It deserves a great visionary boat and it has got one today,” Inslee exulted.
Ferguson joked that he wondered whether it would be possible to rename the Wenatchee as the Inslee. Washington’s former chief executive responded that it would be better to rename it the Trudi, for the former first lady who was standing nearby and has been his most trusted adviser.
Amid the friendly banter, no one mentioned that superstitious mariners consider it bad luck to rename a vessel.
When the Wenatchee returns to service, it will ply the Seattle-Bainbridge route, which has the highest ridership at Washington State Ferries. It will run part-time in the evenings to ease in, returning to full-time service by the end of the month. Ferguson said the 202-car ferry now takes the crown as the largest hybrid-electric ferry in North America
A little less vibration and a little quieter
As the Wenatchee set sail from downtown Seattle on a short figure-eight loop around the bay, passengers noted a little less of the usual rumble while getting underway. Later, the captain steered the vessel on battery power alone for a spell.
“When we’re going along at service speed and we’re on pure electric, it’s noticeably quieter in the cabin,” Captain Robert Merideth said in an interview. “On the car deck not so much because of the noise of the boat going through the water.”
“It’s wonderful to drive,” Merideth added from the wheelhouse. “We have to look to the future.”
The main reason the state spent $133 million on the hybrid-electric conversion and other mid-life refurbishment was to save fuel and reduce air pollution. On that score, the climate friendliness will initially be constrained by the lack of any place to plug in the Wenatchee to recharge its massive battery packs.
The complicated shore power infrastructure is in the design phase for the downtown Seattle, Bainbridge, Bremerton, Kingston and Clinton terminals. The Seattle terminal’s plug-in charging arm and power supply will probably be completed first, but not before 2029, according to a presentation to the state House Transportation Committee on Tuesday.
During the Wenatchee’s conversion to battery-powered propulsion, shipyard workers removed two locomotive-sized diesel engines. They kept two diesel-driven electric generators to supply backup power for when the batteries run low. The ultimate goal is to operate purely electric most of the time. But for the next few years, those diesel generators are the full-time source of power for all of the boat’s systems.
“We anticipate saving 25% on the fuel just running in hybrid mode on this boat until we can start charging” from shore, Washington State Ferries chief Steve Nevey told reporters on board Tuesday.
Nevey said the revamped ferry’s powertrain works somewhat akin to a plug-in hybrid Prius. In the engine room, staff chief engineer Terry Chen called up an on-screen display that showed the direction of the electron flow between the batteries and the motors that Prius drivers might recognize from their own car dashboard displays. The updated ferry will get an efficiency boost by recapturing energy, not from regenerative braking as in a car but from the boat motor shedding load when the captain pulls back the throttle.
WSF said the battery banks in the engine room below the car deck are equipped with water mist fire suppression systems and advanced safety monitoring features. The batteries themselves are said to be fire resistant and have “emergency stop circuits,” according to a handout.
Will there be more ferry conversions?
The overhaul of the vintage 1998 Wenatchee took nearly twice as long as planned and ran far over the original budget. WSF Electrification Program Administrator David Sowers told state lawmakers on Tuesday that it has been “a very long and difficult project for us.”
“There were things about the vessel that weren’t fully captured in the design drawings,” Sowers explained. “It’s like an old house. As you open up the walls, you find things that you didn’t expect, and you have to make changes to the contract.”
WSF owns two other ferries of the same Jumbo Mark II class, the Tacoma and the Puyallup. Sowers said he anticipates it would cost significantly less to convert the Wenatchee’s sister ships to hybrid electric propulsion given all the lessons learned over the past two years.
Whether the Wenatchee is a one-off or the first in a series of diesel to hybrid-electric conversions as envisioned by Inslee remains an open question.
In March, Ferguson pressed pause on planned conversions of the Tacoma and Puyallup in order to keep as many ferries in the water as possible and speed up the restoration of pre-pandemic service levels. On Thursday, Ferguson said his thinking about this has not changed; he’ll reevaluate conversion plans after the surge of visitors anticipated to descend on Western Washington for soccer’s 2026 World Cup abates.
“I’m very proud to be here standing on the first hybrid electric vessel in Washington state’s ferry fleet,” Ferguson said. “The good news is it certainly won’t be the last.”
That remark left a smile on Inslee’s face, but it was an easy pledge for Ferguson to make because the state recently ordered three brand new 160-car hybrid electric ferries from a Florida shipyard. The first of the ferries is expected to be delivered around 2030.
Washington State Standard reporter Jerry Cornfield contributed to this report.
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