Solar-Powered Boat Carries 8.5 Tons of Lithium-Ion Batteries

bshell writes "The Verge has a great photo-essay about Tûranor PlanetSolar, the first boat to circle the globe with solar power. 'The 89,000 kg (nearly 100 ton) ship needs a massive solar array to capture enough energy to push itself through the ocean. An impressive 512 square meters (roughly 5,500 square feet) of photovoltaic cells, to be exact, charge the 8.5 tons of lithium-ion batteries that are stored in the ship's two hulls.' The boat is currently in NYC. Among other remarkable facts, the captain (Gérard d'Aboville) is one of those rare individuals who solo-rowed across both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, journeys that took 71 and 134 days, respectively. The piece has a lot of detail about control systems and design."

Comments

Net Energy Use?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone have an estimate of how much energy it takes to produce and transport 17,000 pounds of lithium ion batteries?

Is this really an efficient solar use compared to, say, sail?

Re:Net Energy Use?

[KGIII]

I am hoping that you know this but I am compelled to respond to your post. I feel like I'm potentially preaching to the choir here but, well, it could be possible that you don't know this. If you don't then, well, I feel sad for you but not in a bad way. The quote is pretty common... The quote is also usually finished with a statement about how the USSR just used a pencil.

The reality is that NASA didn't develop (or pay for the development) of the space pen at all. It was developed by Fisher, at their own expense, and with no guarantee that it would be purchased by NASA for use in space. What had happened was that NASA had paid way too much money for some mechanical pencils and the public found out about the expensive pencils and all hell broke loose. Keep in mind how much we were spending on the space race at the time, be sure to convert those dollars to today's dollars for a true comparison. Americans were well and truly pissed and justifiably so.

Citation

What the above link sort of touches on is the trouble with the idea of using a pencil, which is something you hadn't mentioned at all but I'll bring it up in order to be complete. One of the reasons that I understand a pencil is a bad idea (while sort of mentioned in the article they don't go into in at any depth and don't cover this specifically) is that every time you write there are microscopic fragments of graphite that break away. In a weightless environment they can go all over the place and graphite is also a very good conductor of electricity. The various electronics were very sensitive at the time and while most systems had a backup any point of failure was seen as a bad thing. The small bits of graphite could conceivably float away, enter a computer system, and cause a short - which wouldn't necessarily result in a fire but could possibly be a Bad Thing® and *could* potentially cause a fire in and of itself. (I'm not sure how well pencils themselves burn or how much the flammability of the pencil itself was a concern that actually was for NASA to be honest.)

That is, as near as I can remember, how the story was relayed to me by someone who worked on the earlier Apollo missions. The conversation was over more than one beer (and about a lot more than that) so I may have missed something. The linked citation pretty much goes along with the story as he detailed it.

If I may digress a bit... I was not alive for the earliest launches but I do recall watching the first humans on the moon on television. My parents told me the cliché about how I could do that someday but I never really wanted to walk on the moon. It did change me though. It made me interested in the technology and the computers that got them there. I didn't want to walk on the moon but I did want to work one of those giant beeping machines with the interesting dials and gauges on the ground and maybe visit space for a little while just to experience weightlessness but I wouldn't want to stay there for long. Not every little boy wanted to be an astronaut when we grew up, some of us wanted to play with the machines that went beep instead. And, well, that was me. I never did get to play with NASA's beeping machines but I've was in front of a computer for pretty much all of my professional life and still sit in front of one now that I'm retired.

Re: Same guy who made every car, plane and trains

[Anonymous Coward]

Flammable fuel in an oxygen rich atmosphere?!

vs. Wind Power

[tirerim]

Of course, wind powered boats have been circumnavigating the globe since the 16th century, and can be faster, too. So this is interesting, but not exactly that impressive as a demonstration of eco-friendly sea travel.

Re:What Bat Villian designed this boat?!?!

[viperidaenz]

How much oil would it take to move a boat round the world? I would say 8,500kg of batteries isn't a lot for a 100,000kg boat.

Wattage

[Dan East]

The thing I was most curious about was the total wattage the solar panels can produce: 93,500 watts. It takes 2 days to charge the lithium batteries even at 93.5 kW.

Re:What Bat Villian designed this boat?!?!

[JanneM]

Most ships need ballast anyhow. Not clear that there's any net weight penalty at all from carrying the batteries.

Re:What Bat Villian designed this boat?!?!

[PopeRatzo]

Seems to me that 8.5 tonnes of batteries would take more energy to drag across the water than it was worth.

Striking that in a community of self-identified "geeks" and "techies" that the notion of "proof of concept" would be so difficult to grasp.

"Big deal, they walked around on the moon, but they had to wear big heavy protective suits to do it, so clearly, we shouldn't have a space program. And so what that the Mars Rover is tooling around on the surface of Mars. It moves really slowly so we shouldn't do any more Mars exploration until we can bring a Ford Explorer and get around like Jesus intended, with internal combustion engines burning refined oil."

Here's a group that will embrace any new technology, stand in line to buy an Apple iWristwatch, but the mere mention of anything having to do with research into energy from any source besides Big Oil, Big Coal and Big Nukes and they dig in their heels like somebody's trying to take away their binkie.

Sometimes I'm surprised they're not holding out until their laptops can run on a two-stroke engine.