Comment by reactordev
10 hours ago
I sailed around the world on a sailboat with solar. I know. It’s still better than none at all.
The energy is free. To capture it costs a little bit of money.
10 hours ago
I sailed around the world on a sailboat with solar. I know. It’s still better than none at all.
The energy is free. To capture it costs a little bit of money.
There’s something funny to me about taking your experience with solar on a small sailboat and extrapolating this to a commercial ferry that would need a very large solar installation that’s funny to me. Something tells me the experience isn’t transferable.
The point isn’t to power the main drive, the point is to preserve energy used elsewhere on the ship.
My experience sailing and dealing with vessels from 30ft to 180ft give me a perspective that you probably don’t.
Providing solar panels along the roof would give the ship a few KWh of power that would otherwise be drawing from the main batteries. This would extend the range of the ship by 5-10%.
For how much cost? The range of the ship is already handled well by the batteries. An extra 5-10% isn’t going to meaningfully add value nor reduce fuel costs. There’s no way to recapture the capital expenditure such solar panels would require.
2 replies →
Where are you getting your 5-10% numbers from?
The ship battery is 40,000 kwh and uses at least 10,000 kwh per crossing, with 10 minutes to recharge. A handful of kwh are negligible because this isn't a sailboat.
The electricity sector in Uruguay has 98% renewable power
Catamarans are perfect for scaling up solar like this. Even 40ft is enough to power it entirely off sol at hull speed.
I wouldn’t go that far. Not at hull speed. But a good fraction of it. The silent 60 for example.
Full throttle you’ll be out of juice in a week. Hull speed maybe a month. Depending on wave conditions. But going, stopping, having lunch, enjoying the day, going again, enjoying tomorrow, you can be out there as long as you have provisions.