UNESCO joins Energy Observer, the first hydrogen ship

I will try your link. Thanks.

 

@Dolfiman There seems to be radio silence between me and Energy Observer I contacted them at the link you provided but after 3 days nothing back.
But they shared some pictures of the steering facility at their Facebook site.




Looks like excellent design to me.
How hard wil it be to navigate a ship like that?
We still don't know how powerfull she is.
Guess only thing to do is to visit it somewhere on their tour.

She is now heading towards the mediteranee. The french are sometimes hard to follow. They do not have a shedule of which port next is going to be sailed, or at least I can't find it.
The 19 th of this month she was in Porto Portugal. I guess they are heading towards Gibraltar.

 

The ship is scheduled to be in Monaco late december , near where I live. If an open day to public is proposed, I will try to take this opportunity.

CEA-Liten has 30 people on this project, not all full time of course but probably include few PhD and post Doc , and so likely academic papers will be published in 2018, after these first tests up to Monaco end of 2017.

 

CEA Liten chief engineer for Energy Observer is Didier Bouix, you can try to contact him by using : didier.bouix@cea.fr
Interview (in French unfortunately) :

 

They are finaly revealing the charging of the batteries scheme.

I calculated the total ammount of energy when fully operational.
In oktober 2017 Lissabon, energy produced by the solar panels was 9,318 kW
In optimal sun conditions I calculated 100 % production. (=16,775 Kw)

For instance the solar car from luna has 5,1 Kw.
So this is roughly three times as much.
Nuon Solar Team - Nuna's https://www.nuonsolarteam.nl/en/nuna/
But I must say Nuna gives more specifications then the energy observer.
But slowly but surely we get more specification from them.

Detail of the hydrogen central point:

 

It (Solar) sails against heavy seas!
Energy Observer https://www.facebook.com/EnergyObserverExpedition/videos/1781575785249512/

 

The new elected french president Macron at a presentation of a scale-model of the energy observer during the COP 23
Climate Confrence now in Berlin.

"Make our planet great again" is one of the motto's.

Notice the nasty looking body guard in the back.

Video in french about the presentation of this emmission free boat.
Energy Observer https://www.facebook.com/EnergyObserverExpedition/videos/1798578813549209/

 

Many thanks for all the pics. I do not call that luxury. I do not see any wood or custom hand made element. I call that just clean industrial design, using standard elements and ordinary materials, with the same requisites (including fireproofing), as in commercial european ferries. That looks furiously ferry boat. If the materials and elements have been donated, and it's very likely, this interior is very cheap and easy to maintain. Just a sponge and soap. A few LED lights and it's done. If anyone thinks it is luxury the conceptor has met his goal.
I have used similar industrial elements, foams and linings in fishing boats as they are certified DNV, Llyods and Veritas, so that simplifies greatly the certification and the insurance of the boat. And finally it's no more expensive than those made by the shipyard.
I have worked in luxury shipyards in the seventies, and luxury looks very different, by materials and by design. Let say tables in mahogany, discreetly inlayed with jewellers bronze, silver and mother of pearl -Yes my dear I want something very simple in my sail boat, and I'm fed up of marquetry- and just 6 coats of varnish -please no gold powder and pearl in the varnish, it's a modest 80 feet yacht-. Or Saarinen seats made in laminated wessembé and teak with cushions made with special marine lamb leather. 6000 bucks each in 1975, black friday price. And the Dutch 100 feet motorsailor had 12 Saarinen seats around the dining table. That's luxurious luxury.
French sense of comfort before taking the TGV high speed train. The restaurant of the train station Gare de Lyon at Paris, the Train Bleu.

 

It would be great to understand the costs of this thing. Regardless of how ugly they might be...If the boat can be built for say 300-500k; you might have a commercially viable product. If it is 2million; that pays for lots of fuel. If the hydrogen system is x dollars, or the windvane y dollars; people could consider portions of the build viable and others less so.

 

It's a reseach project and publicity stunt.
Goor advertisement for Acor hotels and a lot of other companies.
They promote zero-emmision technology and it's possible in sunny areas.
Don't know how the weather is with you Fallguy in the US of A.
But we have darek clouds and a lot of rain in autumn.
In sunny California this boat might be a real Hydrogen producer!

@llan voyager
About the interior, I like the plastic look.
Looks a modern spaceship.

"Saarinen seats made in laminated wessembé and teak with cushions made with special marine lamb leather."
That will be fantasic design. What wharf was this 100 feet dutch motorsailor?
Tjongert, Huisman, Vitters and Feadship to name a few...

 

Winter in Minnesota is low sun angles and plenty of clouds, but today is beautiful and should be about 45F.

I would still like to see the cost breakout-something like this
Hydrogen generator - xxxx
Batteries - xxxx
Windvane - xxxx
Engine - xxxx
they could even discuss scalability to reduce costs, so like 100 produced annually could lower the costs to yyyy

Then they are using saltwater to produce hydrogen? Isn't salt and oxygen a byproduct? So, are they technically emitting salt and doesn't that make them not zero emissions, but zero carbon emissions? Sorry if I seem snarky, but most everything that seems perfect is not. If the ocean freight carriers all started producing salt for every mile they traveled; it might be worse than carbon. No? Just a question that seems overlooked here. I think raising the salt content of the oceans seems impossible, but leave it to man to find a free way to travel the oceans and the only cost is raising the salt content and man would overlook it until things got ugly.

 

@SHAKEL Royal Huismans. They were building Saudade II in this time 1975 but the job was the retrofitting of a steel yacht made in England, rather old as the hull was riveted, and bought by a dutch guy. Huismans managed the retrofitting but the work was in fact done by a myriad of local companies as Huismans was very busy with the aluminium racers.
I was "mercenary" during a 3 month contract for one of these companies, and I was not absolutely not interested by the historic details of the boat. I was simply making money by conceiving the tooling and making tons of laminated pieces in wood epoxy, and they paid very well my expertise. A more industrial job than naval.
The interior design was done by a finnish designer in the Bahaus International Saarinen style. In my opinion not very well fitted to the character of a old style motor sailor, but that was high fashion and thus extremely expensive. The owner poured money by 5 gallons buckets filled with 100, maybe 500, USD bank notes.
It's that I call luxurious luxury, overpaying everything for a dubious fashionable result like the Iphones or 10000 bucks carbon bicycles for riding the sunday around the park.

 

Nice work if you can get it. I visited Royal Huisman in Vollenhove once. They were building Flyer II (Winner Whitbread round the world)
Looked very impressive to me. I was 17 years old at that time.

About ever increasing pricing of luxury goods. Some people just have all the money in the world and start throwing with it, and get even richer all the time.
I worked for Larry Ellison one time so I can tell a lot about his extravagant money spending in time of the America's cup in 2010 (the dog fight between Oracle and Alinghi)
He spend about a million per day. Resulting in wing design that bought us foiling. I must say he did good with his money.

What to say about carbon built Lamborghini's?

Lamborgini Veneno 4.5 million US$

Lamborghini Sesto Elemento 2.2 million US$
And those two are not reseach programs for zero emmision power supply
The Energy Observer is!

 

@SHAKEL And the Lamborghini is not even technically interesting. The design is not even ground breaking. Just an useless toy. The Citroen DS, a mass produced car was far more interesting in the design and techniques. As you say The Energy Observer is a useful project; we'll see if they are able to produce hydrogen and to stock it with a everyday practical system, using ordinary, cheap, recyclable materials as alternative to exotic batteries for some applications, and for thermal engines.

 

From my quick overview of the specs, they say they are trying to generate Hydrogen from prop spin when underway from that unimpressive little Kite.
They must be getting a big tax break or govt subsidy.