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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.
Did he make it all the way?
I thought Chief Lapu Lapu capped his arse.
I could Google it but why?
No brain, no pain.
We once sailed cheap, washed cloth diapers, drank from glass bottles, etc. Time to return to those means of doing things green.
Okay. Ignore Magellan because he personally didn't make it. But there were thousands of others who did make it WAY before ships were powered by engines.
Magellan himself did not survive the voyage, but others of his crew did. The point being that the SHIP went around the world using wind energy.
Here, here! I certainly agree. I raised my children using cloth diapers.
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.
It scaled out into a worldwide network of wind powered ships engaging in commerce, which this dude's stunt only really repeats.
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."
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.
Magellan didn't make it, but one of his ships did, of course on wind power all the way.
Sailing was cheap because people were cheap. Commercial sailing died because fuel cost less than labor. Glass bottles died out because it's cheaper to make new plastic than to wash and transport used glass (and deal with all the breakage). And cloth diapers... let's face it, nobody wants to have to deal with someone else's (literal) shit any more than they absolutely have to, even if they're your own children.
in the 1950s
https://www.amazon.com/crossin...
Mostly random stuff.
So he's using the solar power to move the vessel, so the wind turbine will spin and cause drag.
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.