It’s frustrating, but true: Nobody seems yet to know exactly what it costs to own an all-electric boat. So, if you’re considering purchasing something like Hinckley’s nifty new all-electric Dasher — or joining our other clients and commissioning a custom boat from us — you will have to feel your own way to estimates on what that boat will cost to own. Here is the bottom line on electrons: Electric propulsion is simply too early stage for meaningful wide ranging cost estimates. Let’s start with Electric Cars. It seems nutty, but the automotive world is the place to start for […]
On Making a 50-knot Electric Speedboat:
It’s been a long and winding electric road. We first got involved in using batteries to drive a boat on our hybrid Zogo back in 2009. Still — almost ten years later — the electric revolution is still “just over the horizon.” We continue to consult for practical cross-platform propulsion systems in our client’s boats. We have a custom lobster boat coming that will feature just such a system. We’re following the hybrid power wave in European harbors. And we keep tinkering with ideas to see if the calculus of electrons in boats is changing. So we wanted to see […]
Cuomo’s Steampunk Picnic Boat.
Even governors, it seems, have electric tug boat dreams. Two years ago, we began work on an early-stage, cross-platform electric propulsion project for the Maine State fishing fleet. Details are still hush-hush. We can’t spill the beans on our electric lobster boat just yet. But our discretion has not stopped us from tracking alternative powerplants in other boats since. One of the most intriguing — and frustrating — is the 2014 electric repowering of this classic 1928 canal tug, pictured above, by New York State Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority. Cuomo […]