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The Funky Boat Circling the Planet on Renewable Energy and Hydrogen Gas (wired.com)
Victorien Erussard, an experienced ocean racer from the city of Saint-Malo in the north of France, was halfway through a dash across the Atlantic when he lost all power. Never again, he thought. "I came up with the idea to create a ship that uses different sources of energy," he says. The plan was bolstered by the pollution-happy cargo ships he saw while crossing the oceans. "These are a threat to humanity because they use heavy fuel oil." Five years on, that idea has taken physical form in the Energy Observer, a catamaran that runs on renewables. From a report: In a mission reminiscent of the Solar Impulse 2, the solar-powered plane that Bertrand Picard and Andre Borschberg flew around the world a few years back, Erussard and teammate Jerome Delafosse are planning to sail around the planet, without using any fossil fuel. Instead, they'll make the fuel they need from sea water, the wind, and the sun.
The Energy Observer started life as a racing boat but now would make a decent space battle cruiser prop in a movie. Almost every horizontal surface on the white catamaran is covered with solar panels (1,400 square feet of them in all), which curve gently to fit the aerodynamic contours. Some, on a suspended deck that extends to the sides of the vessel, are bi-facial panels, generating power from direct sunlight as well as light reflected off the water below. The rear is flanked by two vertical, egg whisk-style wind turbines, which add to the power production. Propulsion comes from two electric motors, driven by all that generated electrical energy, but it's the way that's stored that's clever. The Energy Observer uses just 106-kWh (about equivalent to a top-end Tesla) of batteries, for immediate, buffer, storage and energy demands. It stores the bulk of the excess electricity generated when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing as hydrogen gas.
The Energy Observer started life as a racing boat but now would make a decent space battle cruiser prop in a movie. Almost every horizontal surface on the white catamaran is covered with solar panels (1,400 square feet of them in all), which curve gently to fit the aerodynamic contours. Some, on a suspended deck that extends to the sides of the vessel, are bi-facial panels, generating power from direct sunlight as well as light reflected off the water below. The rear is flanked by two vertical, egg whisk-style wind turbines, which add to the power production. Propulsion comes from two electric motors, driven by all that generated electrical energy, but it's the way that's stored that's clever. The Energy Observer uses just 106-kWh (about equivalent to a top-end Tesla) of batteries, for immediate, buffer, storage and energy demands. It stores the bulk of the excess electricity generated when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing as hydrogen gas.
The rear is flanked by two vertical, egg whisk-style wind turbines, which add to the power production.
I guess these folks haven't heard of sailing.
navigating around the world on wind power has been done, google Magellan...
Or they could have just put up a mast and some canvass.
Might even be faster too.
Look, I know it's easy to make fun of this guy and his crazy boat.
And that's because it's a stupid fucking boat with absolutely zero usable square footage for little things like "being a person on a boat", because it's a terrible design.
A boat that is just a giant solar panel. Then add a sail and a fan blowing the sail. Think how cool that would be!
I'm certainly blown away by how they managed to build such an expensive and complex boat that isn't capable to doing any useful work whatsoever.
It's French.
They are good at that sort of thing.
What we really need is ships that extract plastic from the water and use that. Shipping routes might have to change a bit to actually go through the crap but there is far more than enough to power all ships in the world. It would be nice if they could simultaneously capture the CO2.
tiny photos?
https://media.wired.com/photos...
https://media.wired.com/photos...
I'm impressed to see "funky" used in a non-ironic way. Got to be the first time this century.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
it's basically like all the houses around here but a lot more bouyant. nothing new nor any interesting use of any current tech. i guess my point is if you say "egg whisk-style" when you mean VAWT you lose all credibility. "hydrogen gas"? you mean hydrogen fuel cells of which there are plenty to just buy online. what i will say to anyone considering a VAWT is no, stop, unless the equipment is free and your engineering skills are superb
The simpler and cheaper sailing becomes, (here using the word "sailing" as a generic term for being on a boat that is moving,) for example, power-boating without having to pay all the costs of conventional fuel in the copious quantities necessary to move a sizable vessel vast distances without wind power, the more unqualified people will be on the water, constituting a hazard to navigation. That it requires skill discourages those who don't have the time or are unwilling to exert the effort required to learn things necessary to be a competent skipper or captain or whatever, which is to the benefit of all concerned. (People who don't belong on the water, let alone in charge of a vessel of any kind, are more likely to wreck their boats, (or others' vessels) with harm to themselves, crew, if there are any, passengers if there are any, bystanders, etc., or loss of life, so I am content with the current state of affairs that such people are discouraged by the difficulty and investment in time and effort required, and thereby their numbers are minimized.
I'm not a snob, nor do I claim to be anything even remotely LIKE fully qualified myself, but I have completed a small-boat sailing class, and have sailed solo in a small craft around a large lake on completion of the course for hours, and managed to stay afloat, and dry, after attending a course on how to do so safely, and in accordance with the "rules of the road," (as they're paradoxically called in boating, which strikes me as odd, since most boats lack the wheels, headlights, amber sidemarkers and brake lights needed to be operated on roads, and there are other challenges as well, since they're mostly designed for water, and most of them, when actually being used and not stored, are generally used on water of some kind,) safe and effective handling of the boat, setting of the sail, switching from one side to the other while tacking, and so on. I am slowly reading through a number of books on boating, sailing, techniques, etc., learning manual solar and celestial navigation (w/, i.e., e.g., a sextant,) and other sailing skills necessary for basic competence so that I will be ready to join the community of boaters and cruisers when I finally DO buy a boat, or build one, (hahahah right,) and to be worthy of joining that community, and not a nuisance or a hazard to others.
For privately owned boats, AFAIK in most places, there aren't a lot of hard and/or fast requirements for what you have to do to have a boat and drive it around. It's not like having a car, at least not here, to the best of my knowledge. So until they change the rules, I'm glad this is only a new thing and I hope it doesn't catch-on, and there don't end up being even more people floating around, and doing dumb things out on the water.
The largest container ships are 400m long by 59m wide. Their engines produce a max of about 75,000 kW of power. If you assume the engines normally operate at 80% peak generating capacity, that's 60,000 kW.
If you covered the entire top of the ship with solar panels, that would be 400m*59m = 23,600 m^2 of solar panels (actually a bit less due to curvature at the bow and stern).
How much power would the panels need to produce to replace the diesel engines? 60,000 kW / 23,600 m^2 = 2.5 kW/m^2, or 2500 Watts/m^2.
The solar constant at the Earth's orbit is only 1361 Watts/m^2. Best case on earth (sun directly overheat) gets you about 1000 Watts/m^2. Typical commercial-grade solar panels can convert this into about 150-200 Watts/m^2. Solar capacity factor (which takes into account night, weather, seasons, movement of the sun through the sky) at the latitudes commonly used for shipping is around 0.15 (Western Europe is worse at close to 0.1). Which lowers the average panel production (for a year) down to 22.5 - 30 Watts/m^2.
So basically covering an entire container ship with solar panels will only produce about 1% of the power it needs to propel itself.
in the 1950s
https://www.amazon.com/crossin...
Mostly random stuff.
Circumnavigating the planet is what was meant.
Circling the planet is more like the moon's job. This catamaran is not in orbit.
Have you heard of wind?
It's funky only if you've been oblivious the developments in the yachting world (esp. catamarans and French sail racing). State of the art design, state of the are materials, even state of the art propulsion equipment (the ideas are old but the implementation is SOTA).
Also, see this for what it is: advertising for renewable energy and responsible environmental practices. While this is utterly impractical (currently) for a ship, the scale _is_ practical for a reasonably sized private dwelling.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
The guy is one of the premier sail racers in the world. The boat is a riff of the kind of high performance cat- and tri- maran sail boats he has raced. He's doing this to highlight renewable energy's potential.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Hydrogen fuel cells are impractical in land vehicles because even though they are lighter than batteries for the energy they store, they take up a lot of physical space. On the Ocean there's plenty of space and weight is more of an issue, so it works out better. Less weight means less volume below the waterline. This means it takes less energy and creates less drag to propel the boat.
I thought this post was about a nuclear submarine. They also make hydrogen gas, as a byproduct of making oxygen to breathe. It also runs on renewable energy, well, energy that as renewable as the sun is.