The Port of Seattle is celebrating the arrival of shore power to its Bell Street Cruise Terminal at Pier 66 with an episode of its Diving In series. The shore power connection was installed last year.

Mallory Hauser, the port’s sustainability communications program manager, joins Stephanie Jones Stebbins, managing director of the Maritime Division, for a chat about the impacts of shore power technology.

The connection became available on Pier 66 in October as part of a $44-million investment that brought shore power to all of Seattle’s cruise berths.

“This is a very important step on our way to decarbonization,” Stebbins said during her chat with Hauser.

“When vessels come into our port, if they can turn off their engines and plug in to the city electricity to run their operations, it really reduces the amount of air pollution and greenhouse gases. It really helps both the port and our cruise line partners to achieve their greenhouse goals,” she continued.

Bringing shore power to Pier 66 was a challenging task and a unique engineering project for the port, Stebbins noted.

“(The terminal) is located in such a difficult location to get power delivered to, in the middle of our downtown grid. Our engineers were super innovative and figured out how to bring power to the facility via a mile-long underwater cable,” she added.

The innovative project brought a lot of challenges, including studies related to potential environmental impacts. It was also necessary to work closely with Seattle City Light.

“This is a lot of power being delivered to this location. So, we had a lot of work to figure out where we could connect to the city’s system and work with them to safely make that connection with the underwater cable,” Stebbins explained.

She also highlighted project support from city, state and federal government entities, as well as Seattle’s longshore partners and the construction and contracting community.

The Port of Seattle is now looking forward to receiving only shore-power-equipped cruise ships starting in 2027.

“We are also making upgrades to our shoreside equipment to make it more flexible so that every vessel should be able to plug in,” Stebbins said.