Tesla Electric Yacht unveiled...

[first wind]

Originally Posted by TrentePieds

Quote: "...humans need to start considering population growth control as a part of environmental sustainability but, if you even mention something like that, people have a fit"

Well, let's all have a fit then :-) Flo Nightingale and George Lister have a lot to answer for. Their legacy has reduced the death rate of the human race so far below the birth rate that there really isn't any way back.

Do you have a workable, morally acceptable suggestion for increasing the death rate to equal the birthrate? While we are at it, we prolly need to enhance the death rate so that at some target date - let it be set by the UN - we reduce Planet Earth's "viral load" of H.sapiens to, say, half of what it is now.

Now, in my lifetime a number of despots have tried to accomplish that. None of us liked it!

The option of course is the TrentePieds "Green Stamp" method of birth control :-)

TrentePieds

the more morally acceptable option is to reduce the birth rate. birth control has given humans the ability to do that. now, we just need to spread the wisdom to see it as a necessity. the problem is, for every responsible couple who would willingly limit their reproduction rate to one child, you have many more that won't and, what's worse, is that many couples will continue to pump out four or more kids, even if you could get people to realize the importance of the issue....many will use religion as a reason not to limit their reproduction.

however, if every new couple limited themselves to one child, that would halve the population rather quickly without killing people off before they reach reproductive maturity.

the problem is, it would require educating the world's population and actually getting the vast majority of the people to actually realize the need and to see it as their responsibility. of course, we all know how many totally irresponsible people are out there having kids they neither want nor can afford all because they are too lazy or too careless to bother with birth control. so, it is a huge problem with no easy answer. you simply can't count on the vast majority of hairless talking apes to exercise wisdom or responsibility.

[first wind]

Originally Posted by StuM

Try asking about guns on board

lol. you forget to mention asking about multi-hulls compared to mono-hulls or full keel compared to fin keel. the list could go one forever. easier to say: try asking anything where there can be more than one opinion.

[valhalla360]

Originally Posted by first wind

i think you kind of misunderstand because of the use of the word 'hybrid'. as you point out, 'hybrid engine' actually denotes a specific kind of power plant. however, many people use it to mean any kind of power creation that is not strictly fossil fuel driven; where some or most of the power comes from another source. and, that usage is not wholly incorrect.

Those people would be using the term incorrectly in relation to propulsion systems. Incorrect use of terms leads to confusion and poor selections.

the word 'hybrid' means: "the offspring of two plants or animals of different species or varieties, such as a mule (a hybrid of a donkey and a horse) or a thing made by combining two different elements; a mixture.

Closer to the true meaning and if you check most genetic hybrids are unmitigated failures.

to give a specific answer to the question of what is the goal people wish to achieve with 'hybrid' engines:

they are looking to find/use alternative energy forms that will provide for our needs while having far less negative environmental costs than existing methods and that will be renewable so that energy production will be insured for future generations.

Then a hybrid is not what you want. Hybrid power plants that provide similar propulsive capability on a displacement cruising boat will use more fuel. Be larger and more environmentally impactful to produce and generally worse.

i kind of thought everyone understood that's what it's about.

That was the problem I was pointing out. Most people just hear a green slogan and say it must be great without understanding what they are cheering on.

as i said before, a big part of our need to seriously consider these issues (perhaps the biggest part) is because of our exponentially growing planetary population.

There are far better ways to impact this. First get a vasectomy or get your tubes tied (depending on what gender you identify with). Next move into the smallest unheated or air conditioned apartment you can find and turn off the electricity....continue until you are unhappy as possible. (I'm deleting the unrelated diatribe on being ecofriendly as it's not related to the original question of what is the goal of selecting a hybrid propulsion system)

There is no magic propulsion system that make make your eco-footprint go away. So far you have not made a case for a hybrid propulsion system.

[valhalla360]

Originally Posted by first wind

surely, they do use alternating current. i can't imagine they power their factory with DC current or use no electricity at all

Nice attempt to dodge the point.

The kid who drew this up is playing off of Tesla's name the same way the car company is playing off his name.

[valhalla360]

Originally Posted by StuM

Unfortunately WW2 submarines could not "operate on electric as prime".
They suffered from the same handicap that hybrids boats suffer from today

As an example:
The USS Balao was powered on the surface by four diesel engines and had a top speed of just over 20 knots (37 km/hr); cruising at 10 knots (18 km/hr) her range was 11,000 nautical miles (20,000 km). Two 126-cell battery groups gave her a submerged top speed of 8.75 knots (16.2 km/hr); holding her speed to 2 knots (4 km/hr), she could remain submerged for 48 hours.

https://cs.stanford.edu/people/erobe...ines-intro.htm

You are confusing them with facts again. They want magic solutions that are all positive with no negative.

100% of all WWII submarine miles were done under diesel power and the least efficient miles were those done using the diesel to generate electricity which was then converted to propulsive power. The most efficient were at moderate speeds directly propelled by the diesel engines.

[Cadence]

Originally Posted by valhalla360

Nice attempt to dodge the point.

The kid who drew this up is playing off of Tesla's name the same way the car company is playing off his name.

[first wind]

Originally Posted by valhalla360

There is no magic propulsion system that make make your eco-footprint go away. So far you have not made a case for a hybrid propulsion system.

i wasn't making a case for a hybrid system, actually. i was, perhaps, making a case for finding and implementing alternative methods for generating energy.

i disagree about the failure rate of genetic hybrids. almost all of the plants we eat for foods are hybrids. they were created by mixing different varieties of the same plants or in some cases different plants to get larger or sweeter fruit, bigger yields, or to allow a plant to grow in environments it normally couldn't thrive in (this is done with wine grapes). hybridization of food plants has been a big success. tons of flowering or non-flowering house plants are also hybrids.

no one can claim that the mule hasn't been a very useful hybrid.

considering the discovery of neanderthal DNA in all humans that left the african continent, we could be considered hybrids, too. we are a hybrid of pure homo sapiens and neanderthals. i'd say we have been pretty successful.

[first wind]

Originally Posted by valhalla360

Nice attempt to dodge the point.

The kid who drew this up is playing off of Tesla's name the same way the car company is playing off his name.

wow. relax. i was joking. so serious.


by the way. i think you mistake my intention. i wasn't defending this specific fake boat. the question was raised as to why these types of things...electric or alternative power boats...keep popping up in threads. also, it was asked what the intended goal of desiring such things was. i was attempting to answer those two questions.

of course, there is another less loft reason for wanting an electric motor for your sailboat:

internal combustion is loud and stinky. it's great at the drag strip or our riding a motorcycle. it kind of ruins the sailing experience. they don't call them stink-pots for nothing. electric motors are quite and don't stink or create a lot of vibration. they don't get oil in your bilge.if electric power could be worked out properly, it would be an awesome thing for sailboats.

[chris-travel]

I love the idea of some fuel alternative to fossil fuels and electric is a possible alternative. I love the idea of using solar and wind and even the hydro electric (I don't know much about them). Nothing else to get oil and gas out of control our pocket book. There are a couple companies that I know of that already use electric motors for powering up to 50 foot boats. They are just very expensive motors at this time. I hope the technology gets here sooner rather than later. I use solar for most of my home power needs and I love using it. I am new to the boating world so don't know much about the electric power needs to push a trawler long distances each day. I have an idea it is a lot though. More to learn.

[Racoon1960]

Yep, that's the idea. If we can demonstrate enough interest, someone might show up with the key to make it happen at an affordable price

[jeepbluetj]

Interestingly, the motor in a Tesla is an AC motor. There's an inverter to drive it from the DC batteries.

Same with most other all-electric and hybrid vehicles. Most folks can hear the inverter doing it's thing.

This has nothing to do with sailing at all.

[TrentePieds]

The "problem" (as implicitly defined and discussed here) was solved a long time ago. It just ain't a "problem". The missing piece of technology is the means of energy storage. Do some math and it becomes obvious right away that even using the most advanced battery technology we have available at this time, the "all-electric yot" is an oozly-woozly bird.

Once you solve the "storage of energy problem" you can begin to think about by what means you might deliver 500HP continuously for hours on end, because that is what it takes to power a fifty-footer. Start with delivering 500 continuous HP from batteries to motor. That "problem" was solved about 120 years ago, and the solution thunders by me half a mile away about a dozen times a day. Then go hog-wild and consider how you get 500HP continuous from solar panels to batteries. Might want to have a quick butchers at the "insolation per square foot", a metric that the all-knowing Ms. Google will be glad to give you, I'm sure.

So maybe we can give poor ole Tesla a rest :-)

TrentePieds

[Stumble]

I think the reason people keep showing up hopeing electric can be used on boats is they see the huge gains in cars, and home systems, and simply have no idea how that translates to the demands of a boat. Because electricity pretty much happens in the background there is no real internal quantity that people ascribe to it.

But just as an example, my 40' sailboat needs about 12kw at the prop to operate at cruising speed of 6kn. It doesn't sound like a lot, and it isn't...

But a 100amp breaker box (which is about the average size for a house in the US) when operating at maximum capacity is about 12kw. So my boat just loafing along at a reasonable speed chews thru about as much power as an entire house can. But when was the last time anyone tripped their main breaker? I can't remember ever having done it, sure a 15 amp from time to time, but the main? Never.

At full speed my boat can claw thru about 35kw of power. So it would take the combined capacity of half my block to feed my engine at full power.

The average American home used 900kwh a month in electricity. A gallon of diesel has about 40kwh of power. So the average American home uses the energy equivilant of about 22 gallons of diesel a month, I can burn thru that a day at cruising speed.


But,but,but cars can do it. Ya, but cars power demands are tiny. As in really close to minimal.

The Tesla with its 85kwh battery pack is generally considered a massive one. But that's the functional equivilant of 2 gallons of gas. My boat holds 40 gallons of diesel, so if I convert I need a battery pack roughly 20 times larger than the Tesla has. Figure out the weight, size and cost of that pack and it obviously looks pretty silly to try and stash it on a 40' sailboat.

Even if we could push battery technology to the very limit of physical possibility, they would only be three times more energy dense than they currently are. That means at a minimum you would only need to buy seven Tesla equivilant battery packs. Which is still a tight fit on a 40' boat.


Then you turn to solar... another issue of scale. Modern solar panels are about 20% efficient, and 1m^2 of space will be hit with 1kw of solar energy. So over the course of the productive day of five hours that 1m^2 is hit with a total of 5kwh of power, of which we can capture 1kwh, which is nice because it make the math easy.

Keeping the numbers the same, my boat uses 288kwh a day (12kwh/h*24hours) at cruising speed, so all I need is 288m^2 of solar panels. The problem is my 40' sailboat has a rough surface area of only 45m^2, so even if I can cover 100% of my boat with solar panels I still only have 1/6 the power needed to keep my boat operating at cruising speed.

Even 100% efficient solar panels cannot provide enough power to keep my boat operating at just cruising speed, let alone at high cruise or full power.

But it works on my house right? Ya but on average a house uses 1.25kwh/h in the US. my boat literly uses more power in two hours than the average house will use in a day. So the solar panels for your house simply aren't big enough, and solar radiation simply isn't energy dense enough.


The solution to this frankly is probably renewable liquid fuels. Very high efficiency conversion between electricity and ethanol would work, because ethanol has a reasonably high energy density and it would probably be possible to convert excess solar generated while on the hook to liquid fuels for electrical use later. Combined with the ability to buy ethanol from the dock if you don't have enough for the next passage.

[Moosemiester]

For all the hype about electric cars they represent a fraction of vehicle sales - and their sales in 2016 declined.

Yes. They declined.

So why the hype? Because hip & trendy = huge gross margins

[TrentePieds]

Bingo Stumble :-0)!!

You stated as succinctly as it can reasonably be done the very nature of the oozly-woozly bird.

My first, rather flippant, response going on about men on bikes winding themselves keeping a hundred watt incandescent bulb lit for five minutes was, of course, an admittedly silly distillation of all you say. And an attempt to keep it light - ahem :-)

I'm admittedly impatient with the starry-eyed enthusiasts that were obviously absent that day in grade X when Jimmy Watt and the horse-power, as well as Jimmy's reason for wanting to define it, along with the use of the stuff Jimmy was lifting, were discussed.

And while we were being starry-eyed, someone mentioned that IHO education is the solution to the world' increasing load of H.sapiens. Would it were! China's draconian "one child" policy was eminently successful, right :-)? Start talking population control to my Indian friends and they have little pink pigs. NIMBY is what you get.

However, it does strike me that that standby of the sailorman, the "figure eight" knot, tied in appropriate places, might be useful. And that is where the TrentePieds' "Green Stamp" method of birth control comes in.

Wot, me worry? I'll be in Fiddlers' Green afore the fit hits the shan, but hit it surely will. Tesla notwithstanding :-)

TrentePieds