July 1, 2024 Issue

This week’s “Talk of the Town” contains an interesting story by Adam Iscoe called "Catamaran." It tells about a hundred-foot-long former racing catamaran from France, retrofitted with solar panels and a hydrogen fuel cell, docked near Wall Street. Iscoe writes,

The vessel, known as Energy Observer, resembled a sperm whale that had been wrapped in roughly ten thousand photovoltaic cells. She made a two-week pit stop during a seven-year, around-the-world voyage, gathering some fresh vegetables, before setting sail again, at dawn.

The craft is battery-powered. Iscoe says,

Just about everything on the vessel—two electric engines, a washing machine, the Starlink satellite hookup, a seawater desalinator, two refrigerators, several MacBooks, a G.P.S. navigation system, lights—is powered by four lithium-ion batteries, which are recharged by a couple of thousand square feet of solar panels, and a hundred and thirty-seven pounds of hydrogen gas. The gas, which is produced using seawater, is stored in eight pressurized tanks.

Iscoe talks with some of the crew and learns how the vessel works:

In the hulls, seawater is desalinized and purified, before an electrolyzer splits H2O into hydrogen and oxygen. After that, the hydrogen gas is converted into electricity, via a custom-built Toyota fuel cell—a version of the technology inside the company’s hydrogen-powered sedan, which emits water vapor instead of exhaust.

Wow! What marvellous green technology! More ships like Energy Observer, please.