Solar-Powered Boat Carries 8.5 Tons of Lithium-Ion Batteries 164
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."
Isn't that cheating? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Why the stupidity (Score:4, Funny)
Clearly they were working on a fishing vessel to go out trolling for engineers. (And quite successfully too it seems)
Re:Alternative technology? (Score:4, Funny)
But what if you wanted to move into the air current? You'd have to wait for the direction to change. It'll never catch on.
Re:Very nice (Score:5, Funny)
A Hindenburg that floats.
Um, airships do float.
10.3.250.11 (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Isn't that cheating? (Score:5, Funny)
No. Cheating would be poking a hole in the back of the battery packs, waiting for the seawater to hit the lithium and taking off like a rocket.
alternative energy (Score:5, Funny)
We should be investigating the use of wind energy for moving ships. Perhaps there is some way (probably very complicated!) in which we could avoid converting the wind energy to electrical energy before converting it into propulsion. I have a feeling we might be able to create some zero emission ships that way.