SEATTLE — The Wenatchee is making history in the Puget Sound.
The Washington state ferry is running on hybrid-electric power. The vessel used to be powered by four diesel engines, but over the past two years, two of those have been removed.
Now the Wenatchee will run part-time on the Bainbridge route beginning next week and full-time by the end of the month, Gov. Bob Ferguson announced Thursday morning.
"For your average passenger, they'll see probably a nice paint job coming out, some fixed seats coming out ," said Forest Nichols, Washington State Ferries maintenance port engineer.
Nichols said he's noticed one major difference.
"To be able to go back and forth and have it be quiet enough to have a conversation in the engine room," Nichols said.
The Wenatchee's sister vessel, the Tacoma, is waiting for its conversion.
Washington State Ferries' chief sustainability officer, Kevin Bartoy, described the volume difference between the two.
"If you can think, literally think of standing next to a train," Bartoy said. "That's what you're standing next to when you're in one of our vessels, but you've got two on either side.
The Tacoma's head engineer has a more practical description: A Seahawks game.
The engine room was so loud, we resorted to hand signals to see the change in store for another of the ferry system's largest vessels.
Like the Wenatchee, two engines will be removed and replaced with batteries.
As crews prep the ferry for its conversion, many wonder if the price tag is worth the drop in decibels. The Wenatchee's hybrid-electric remodel cost $96 million, which is $36 million higher than expected.
"The conversion is much more challenging than constructing a boat from scratch and building it all in one system," said David Sowers, Washington State Ferries program administrator.
The state said the conversion of the two ferries will have a big ripple effect.
"When you're doing something for the first time that's never been done before, it's always gonna take a little longer than it should have," Sowers said. "And I think we were optimistic that it would take 12 months and it's cost more money than was planned, but in the end we've achieved what we had hoped to."
Three-fourths of the emissions from the state government come from Washington State Ferries.
"You can see it on the ferries where they spew out some, some brownish or greenish smoke, right? I mean when they're running really efficiently, it doesn't look so bad. You maybe don't even notice it, but there are still a lot of toxic chemicals there."
Joe Olson, founder of Cetacean Communication, specializes in underwater acoustics for marine life.
While he said the progress on pollution is worth it, there is one problem the ferry conversion won't solve. The new ferry will be quieter for passengers and crew above water, but the modifications won't do much to reduce noise for marine life underwater, particularly orcas.
"It makes their world smaller," Olson said. "It makes it harder for them to find their prey because their sound that the echolocation that comes out."
The solution is not electrification.
"It's actually coming from our propeller," Bartoy said. "It's not coming from the engines . These bubbles are being built up and collapsed from the propeller motion that's creating a frequency. That's interfering with them. Our propellers on the Jumbo Mark 2s aren't gonna be changing. "
"When we start building new vessels, when we're having our new hybrid class of vessels come out, we are looking at the propeller systems for those. "
But Olson said it is still a step in the right direction and a chance to turn down the dial.
"It might not be in the range that's gonna be affecting Southern Resident killer whales, but it is in a range that affects a lot of other marine organisms, so it's gonna be beneficial to have that gone," Olson said.
The Tacoma and Puyallup are the next vessels set for conversion. Those are the same type of vessel as the Wenatchee.
Gov. Ferguson paused the project until at least after the 2026 World Cup. The goal is to have as many vessels available as possible when one of the biggest events in the world comes to the Emerald City.
How much did conversion cost?
We mentioned the cost of the Wenatchee's hybrid-electric conversion. The $96-million price tag was just for the conversion itself. The full cost was about $133 million. Officials said $101 million was planned.
The biggest source of funding came from the Puget Sound Construction Account. That's money set aside for the Department of Transportation for things like improving the ferry system.