Happy new year! This post on 12V Solar Battery Chargers has been updated for 2009.

Solar cells really shine at charging your batteries at remote location or on a boat. They are also useful for maintaining a charge on a 12V battery, such as a car battery. The best (and most expensive) solar battery chargers are flexible, thin-film solar cells. These cells can be folded and packed away easily.

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Ken-ichi Horie, a 69 year old Japanese sailor, is planning a solo 4,350 mile trip from Hawaii to Japan using an innovative wave powered boat. If successful, the trip would earn him a Guinness record while simultaneously proving the viability of wave powered propulsion.

His boat, the Suntory Mermaid II, turns wave energy into thrust using two fins mounted beneath the bow. These fins move up and down with the waves and use them to generate “kicks” that propel the boat forward. Another green element of the journey: all of the radios and electrical equipment are solar powered.

The fins will only garner a top speed of 5 knots, so his trip will take about three months.

From the Popular Science article:

This month, 69-year-old Japanese sailor Ken-ichi Horie will attempt to captain the world’s most advanced wave-powered boat 4,350 miles from Hawaii to Japan. If all goes as planned, he’ll set the first Guinness world record for the longest distance traveled by a wave-powered boat and, along the way, show off the greenest nautical propulsion system since the sail.

At the heart of the record-setting bid is the Suntory Mermaid II, a three-ton catamaran made of recycled aluminum alloy that turns wave energy into thrust. Two fins mounted side by side beneath the bow move up and down with the incoming waves and generate dolphin-like kicks that propel the boat forward. “Waves are a negative factor for a ship—they slow it down,” says Yutaka Terao, an engineering professor at Tokai University in Japan who designed the boat’s propulsion system. “But the Suntory can transform wave energy into propulsive power regardless of where the wave comes from.”

Horie’s latest adventure builds on a storied career of eco-sailing. In 1993 he pedaled a boat 4,660 miles, from Hawaii to Okinawa, setting a world record for the longest distance traveled by a pedal-powered boat.

n 1996 he set the world record for the fastest crossing of the Pacific Ocean in a solar-powered boat. And in 1999, he made a solo trip across the Pacific in a catamaran made from recycled beer barrels.

With a maximum speed of five knots, the Suntory will take two to three months to complete a voyage that diesel-powered craft accomplish in just one. But speed is not the point. The voyage aims to prove that wave propulsion can work under real-world conditions, opening up the technology for commercial applications such as cargo shipping. “Oil is a limited power source,” Horie says, “but there is no limit to waves.”

Via: Popular Science

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The Gisborne family has completed a 12-day trip on their solar-powered electric boat, the Loon. The Gisbornes travelled the Erie and Oswego canals for 12 days before reaching Albany, New York. Monte Gisborne, the captain, said this will mark the first time anyone has traveled an American canal system using solar electric energy as the primary fuel source.

The Tamarack Lake Electric Boat Company designed “The Loon” — it’s a pontoon boat with 738 watts of solar panels mounted on its cover, and a 30 mile range on its 48 Volt deep-cycle battery array. It has a top speed of a 5 MPH.

The boat is “solar-assisted” because it has a built-in battery charger that allows users to augment the solar energy input with electricity from the utility grid, usually from shore power available at marinas or dockside. Electric boats, unlike gas-powered boats, eliminate the discharge of hydrocarbons into waterways.

Monte Gisborne, in an interview, said this about the efficiency of the boat:

The primary consideration here is that internal combustion automobiles and boats, even in this advanced age of computers and emission controls, are horrendously inefficient. We just cannot seem to turn the energy available in a litre of gasoline as efficiently into mechanical energy as we can into heat.

Negating the obvious benefit of solar, and assuming that my boats will get 100 per cent of their energy from the grid, my system efficiency is at least eight times more efficient than the equivalent gas-powered boat, meaning that I can travel at least eight times as far on a unit of energy than the most efficient gas-powered boat.

The actual truth is that a 1969 Chris Craft boat with twin 454-cubic-inch engines (not uncommon on the waterways) is so horrendously inefficient that my boat costs only 1/150 of the fuel costs to run per km.

Generally, the solar panels provide you with about 16 km of free travel on a sunny day. For most customers, 16 km is ample and, even if you travelled 32 km one day, as long as you don’t use it the next day, you’re fine and the batteries will catch up.

Generally, these are weekend toys that soak up the sun all week long, gathering a charge for the weekend.

Via: Groovy Green and the Globe and Mail

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A company called MW-Line in Switzerland has been busy creating solar catamarans for tourism operations, where quietness and clean fuels are major pluses. Their Sun21, a 46 foot catamaran, was the first boat to cross the Atlantic on solar power alone. The Sun21 is actually a commercially available solar Aquabus C60, which holds 60 passengers.

The five-man Swiss crew took less than a month for the Atlantic crossing from the Canary Islands to the Bahamas.

‘Sunny days, we used to go 5 to 6 knots, and a little slower when it was cloudy,’ says the French-speaking skipper, Michel Thonney, of Moudon, Switzerland. ‘I don’t understand why everyone doesn’t use the sun’s power at sea—our voyage was fantastic.’

Thonney has crossed the Atlantic five times, in various vessels. After his latest exploit, though, he is looking for a bigger pond. ‘Our next project is named Planet Solar,’ he notes. ‘We’ll use solar power to take a 30-meter boat clear around the world.’ ‘This proves that in our modern society it is indeed possible to travel the world efficiently and still safeguard the environment.’

The founder of MW-Line is Swiss shipbuilder Mark Wüst. He says MW-Line has built more than 30 Aquabus solar boats for public transportation. These Aquabuses have passenger capacity of between 15 and 75. ‘These electrosolar boats of MW-Line SA are operating on rivers and lakes in France, Switzerland, Germany and France already. The running costs are 20 to 45 times less than for the equivalent powered motor boat.’

Now MW-Line is extending its ranges from Solar Aquabus to leisure boats. It unveiled its latest solar powered houseboat to the public on the lake of Gruyère on Wednesday.

The 8.5-metre (28 feet) Aquabus features a four-bunk cabin, kitchenette and a small bathroom. The cabin’s roof is covered with solar panels supplying the batteries with renewable electricity. The houseboat’s price ranges between US $65,000 to US$110,000.

Via: Sail World

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