US electric boat company Arc says it is bringing the first electric portable tugboat to the Port of Los Angeles; the company is retrofitting a small 26ft (8m) long tug in a new partnership with Portland shipyard Diversified Marine.
The project aims to begin a new era of electric workboats at the Western Hemisphere’s busiest port and beyond.
Arc CEO and co-founder Mitch Lee said: “At Arc, our mission has always been to electrify the entire marine industry. Workboats are a big step towards that end. We’re excited to enter the commercial market with the most advanced maritime technology available. And this project sets the stage for our future efforts.”
Although tugboats are seen as the backbone of ports — moving barges, repositioning cranes, and guiding larger vessels, most are decades old and outdated, and run on diesel. Fuel and maintenance drive more than half of a tugboat’s substantial operating costs. The vessels run short, repetitive missions requiring high torque, and start and end at the same home base. Not only does that make them well-suited to going electric, but doing so can reduce operating expenses. Reliability and uptime, critical measurements for commercial operators, also improve.
This tugboat is powered by Arc’s electric powertrain and software, based on the same high-voltage architecture we designed for the Arc Sport. The vessel features a 600hp dual-motor drivetrain with large lithium-ion battery packs. The vessel is designed with split assembly construction for land transport.
Arc R&D lead Robert Binkowski said: “We’re not starting from scratch. We’re leveraging our substantial engineering resources and IP from our consumer platform. We want to make anything that lives full-time in the harbour zero-emission.”
The Los Angeles and Long Beach port complex handles more trade than any other container port in the Western Hemisphere — around 76% of all waterborne goods that move in and out of the US West Coast, and 31% nationally.
Electrifying workboats helps ports advance toward their own clean air goals. Los Angeles and Long Beach aim to transition to zero-emission equipment by 2030 and zero-emission trucks by 2035, with harbour craft to follow. Replacing the roughly 2,000 tugs in the US could save significant amounts of GHG emissions.
Arc’s retrofitted tugboat will launch its new mission in the Port of Los Angeles later in 2025. Meanwhile, lessons from its integration are said to be already informing designs for larger tugs.
Image: Arc’s portable electric tug (source: Arc)
