When thinking of Volkswagen, yachts probably aren’t anywhere close to being on the short list of possible topics to come up, but that may be changing soon, thanks to a new partnership with a solar yacht manufacturer, Silent-Yachts, to incorporate VW’s MEB electric drive system into its newest model, the Silent Yacht 50.
For ships that only sail the oceans, the Rotorsail made a lot of sense so far, but for ships that must use canals and intracoastal waterways, having those big sails can be rather problematic. The biggest problem? Bridges.
Genius is a difficult thing to understand. To those of us who, like me, are on the outside of it, genius can sometimes seem like madness, and it’s the sort of blurry area where an idea is actually so stupid that it loops back around into genius that we’re going … [continued]
Norsepower, a company that builds modernized sails to reduce fuel consumption and emissions on ships, got an order to install five of its Rotorsails on a bulk carrier in 2021. This is the first order for a bulk carrier, and the company’s sixth installation since founding in 2012.
There’s a $120 billion global hydrogen industry that we have to kick the fossil fuel companies out of. 3-4% of global petroleum use is for long-haul shipping and aviation. About 8% of CO2e emissions globally are from steelmaking. That’s more than enough for CleanTechnica to report on. Boosterism for hydrogen outside of those spaces is just perpetuating the wrong industry.
An Italian company called Sealence has designed a new jet propulsion drive system called DeepSpeed that is fully electric, efficient enough for long-range sea voyages, and — crucially — big enough to be able to power some of the largest classes of megayachts in the world. Of course, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and to heal Sealence get that evidence, the company has enlisted the superbike engineers at Energica to help develop DeepSpeed.
As more and more Teslas get old (or get into accidents), there are more and more Tesla batteries available for new purposes. One clever use is as batteries in electric boats. In Sweden, the sightseeing boat Sylvia is powered by second-life Tesla batteries that were combined for 190 kWh of energy storage capacity.
We’ve had a stream of electric boat stories recently (no pun intended), but something that has never crossed our desk or my mind before is electric boat charging stations. One company was, though.
Volvo Penta and Danfoss Editron have joined forces to embrace electrification in a new pilot program to make the wind industry even cleaner!
As battery prices have dropped, more and more types of electric vehicles have been popping onto the scene. That includes boats of various sorts. Let’s look at a few new ones.
