I pull into the Port of Oakland’s Global Gateway Central terminal following a silver Honda Insight that looks microscopic next to the Singapore, an APL container ship at berth nearby. But the 14-foot car and the 900-foot ship have something in common: They’re both hybrids.

Normally charged by a 2,000-horsepower diesel engine, the Singapore is the first of APL’s five ships—and indeed the first of any container ships in Oakland—that will “cold-iron” or shut down its engines and plug into the electricity grid here. Over the typical 24-hour port call, this will eliminate 1,000 pounds of nitrogen-oxide emissions, 165 pounds of sulfur oxides, and 30 pounds of particulate matter.

I am here with BSR Senior Vice President Eric Olson to tour the ship and see how one part of the transportation industry is improving its environmental performance. (BSR is working with the industry to do this in other ways through our Clean Cargo Working Groupand our research, conducted with support from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, on ports and terminal operations in South China.)

As can be expected, making this change was not a simple matter of hanging an extension cord off the deck. The US$11 million project, partially funded with a US$4.8 million grant from the California Air Resources Board, took four years and involved retrofitting the ships with transformers that could step down the power from the dock, where the company installed substation that connects to the Pacific Gas & Electric grid.

What struck me about this project is that, by any definition, it is costing the company money. Yes, APL received grant funding. But the company still had to chip in more than US$5 million just to get it going. And even with rising fuel prices, paying upwards of US$500 per hour for the 1,000 to 2,000 kilowatts of electricity required to power the ship is still about 15 percent more than it would cost to use diesel.

Although APL would have had to do this in the long run anyway—California is requiring half of all carriers’ fleets to cold-iron by 2014—because of the electricity costs alone, the company probably would have saved money if it had waited a couple more years.

So, why didn’t it wait? In addition to winning bragging rights (APL was the first to do this in Oakland), and taking the extra time to do this right (the other companies may need to rush it to meet the 2014 deadline), my guess is that when it comes to sustainability, those in charge at APL saw the value in taking a leadership role. And that was worth seeing firsthand.