catamarano energy observer

• The Odyssey
• The Innovations

Through expeditions and innovations, Energy Observer is exploring practical solutions whilst developing new technologies to accelerate ecological transition

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Saint-Malo, France

On June 14, Energy Observer completed its round-the-world voyage after 7 years and 68,000 nautical miles. Having set sail from Saint-Malo in 2017, the boat returned to its home port surrounded by all those who took part in this human and technological adventure, and a crowd of locals gathered on the quayside.

Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon, France

From May 17 to 21, Energy Observer made a stopover in Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon, a French group of islands off the coast of Terre-Neuve, Canada.

Halifax, Nouvelle-Ecosse

En route vers l’archipel français, notre navire-laboratoire a dû faire une escale météo imprévue à Halifax, capitale de la Nouvelle-Écosse.

Boston, USA

Energy Observer est arrivé à Boston, dans le Massachusetts, 89ème étape autour du monde et dernier arrêt de notre tournée américaine !

New York, USA

Docked at the North Cove Marina near Manhattan's One World Trade Center, the Energy Observer has completed a 12-day stopover full of New York energy.

The shale boom: unlocking energy or harming the environment ?

Washington dc, usa.

From March 14th to 20th, we had the opportunity to dock just steps away from the White House at the Wharf Marina, providing an opportunity to showcase our solutions to American decision-makers!

USA: a race towards energy independence

Fort lauderdale, florida.

The boat has just finished a few days' stopover in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, the Sunshine State? Yes and no... Our crew had to face thunderstorms and torrential rains. Yet, with 237 days of sunshine per year, Florida is the 3rd state hosting the most solar panels in the US after California and Texas !

A feedback from 6 years of onboard photovoltaic experimentation

• Renewable energies
• Solar energy
• On-board Technologies

Solar energy is the primary source of energy for our laboratory vessel. This energy is converted into electricity, then stored on board. How have photovoltaic technologies evolved over the last 6 years? Explanations with Luc Bourserie, onboard systems engineer.

Wind turbines are ageing, what’s next?

Kourou, french guiana.

The arrival of our laboratory vessel in Kourou, French Guiana, marks a milestone in our catamaran's world Odyssey!

Watch CBS News

Take a tour of the Energy Observer, a sailboat running on 100% renewable energy

By Alecia Reid

April 12, 2024 / 6:11 PM EDT / CBS New York

NEW YORK -- A sailboat running on 100% renewable energy has made its way around the world for the last seven years and is now in New York City until Earth Day.

CBS New York's Alecia Reid got a tour of the vessel.

The Energy Observer is a decommissioned racing catamaran, now refitted with solar panels covering the entire vessel, in addition to innovative technology. It's a step towards a greener, more sustainable, low-carbon future.

"What we're trying to show to people is that a mix of renewable energies is the best option," boat swain George Conty said.

The floating lab is the first self-sufficient, zero-emission vessel. The crew of five uses renewable energy and hydrogen technology to power the boat as they sail around the world. The initial energy comes from the sun and wind.

"The excess, we store it in batteries. Then when the batteries are full and we still have some sun, instead of just losing this energy that arrives on the boat, we produce hydrogen to continue storing this energy in the form of gas," on-board system engineer Luc Bourserie said.

Engineers are constantly testing the technology to ensure it works. The hope is that any part of the prototype can be used as an inspiration to others searching for ecological sustainability.

"We have proof that the technology works," said Beatrice Cordiano, on-board scientist and climate energy expert. "The concept is quite simple, you just have to deploy a lot of renewable energy capacity."

It's definitely tight quarters living on the boat year-round, but the crew has a decent-sized kitchen that they make good use of.

"And sometimes we don't, and make salads. We adapt," Bourserie said.

People interested in touring the Observer can win a chance at the Earth Day Festival in Union Square on April 14. The vessel will remain in New York City until April 22 before heading to the Summer Olympics in Paris.

Alecia Reid is an award-winning, Emmy-nominated reporter for CBS News New York. She is a sustainability and social justice advocate; passionate about giving a voice to people who may not otherwise be able to tell their stories.

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Energy Observer: This space-age catamaran/floating lab is powered by water

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Energy Observer is the first boat to cruise round the world using hydrogen extracted on board from seawater. Hugo explains how this extraordinary vessel works

The problem with electric boats is not the lack of speed or power, it’s the size and weight of the batteries needed to give them a decent range. In simple terms the energy density of 1kg diesel is around 100 times greater than that of a lithium ion battery.

Even taking into account the relative thermal efficiency of an electric motor (90%) compared to a diesel engine (35%), you would still need to carry almost 30 tonnes of lithium-ion batteries to match the equivalent power/range of 1,000 litres of diesel.

To match the energy density of diesel what you really need is a means of storing power in another form that is lighter, denser and immune to the slow power leakage which all batteries suffer from.

The solution which former offshore sailor Victorien Erussard and maritime explorer Jerome Delafosse settled on was hydrogen. Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe (mostly in the form of water), has exceptional energy density (three times greater than diesel) and can either be burnt or converted back into electricity via a fuel cell while emitting nothing but pure water.

To demonstrate hydrogen’s potential as a fuel of the future, they decided to build a boat that was not only powered by hydrogen but also extracted it from the very water it was cruising on.

Since its launch in June 2017, Energy Observer has already cruised 18,000nm and visited over 25 countries extracting hydrogen from the sea, using a combination of solar and wind power, and converting it back to electricity to power its twin electric motors .

We caught up with the crew at a stopover in London to discover the secrets behind Energy Observer’s technology and how that could translate to the world of leisure boats.

Read our full feature on Energy Observer in the January 2020 edition of MBY, which is out now.

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Energy Observer, the legendary catamaran, celebrates her 40th anniversary

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World’s first energy-autonomous electric catamaran—energy observer—docks at altasea.

On April 28th, following a 27-day nonstop journey from the Galapagos to the Port of Los Angeles, the world’s first energy-autonomous electric catamaran docked at AltaSea. Creating and storing its own hydrogen, solar, wind, and hydro power onboard, the Energy Observer advocates for the future of renewable energy and serves as a floating laboratory for the ecological transition needed to restructure humanity’s relationship with the planet. VX News here excerpts Fmr. California EPA Secretary Terry Tamminen , AltaSea’s Tim McOsker , and Energy Independence Now’s Brian Goldstein; each highlighted the technology’s potential for combatting climate change, ocean acidification and accelerating innovation of the blue economy.

Tim McOsker : Today, we're celebrating our partnership with Energy Independence Now and their use of renewable hydrogen power.  This beautiful vessel, the Energy Observer, creates hydrogen power but is also a cogeneration facility in and of itself. Both EIN and AltaSea seek to establish and support technologies for a sustainable environment and for sustainable use of the ocean and blue technology. These great partners, EIN and the Energy Observer, are also showing off and testing technologies that can go into passenger vehicles and long-haul trucks, which can be part of this blue economy, and also part of the larger economy, to combat climate change.

The cars you see here today (at AltaSea), and the vessel behind me, the Energy Observer, are all powered by green hydrogen. These are the stepping stones towards a cleaner, more sustainable future that we all want for ourselves, for our children, our children's children, and future generations.

Terry Tamminen at AltaSea

Twenty-five years ago, I was serving as the Santa Monica Bay keeper. I got to put on a captain's hat every day and go out on a boat, bust polluters, and try to figure out what we could do to protect the ocean. Not far from here, there was a baby gray whale that washed up on the beach. Long story short, over 36 hours, dozens of people got together and rescued this baby gray whale, brought her to Sea World where they nursed her back to health and released her back into the wild.  We all patted ourselves on the back because we rescued this animal—JJ, they named her—and now, after decades of hunting gray whales almost to extinction, they're finally off the endangered species list. And because gray whales have a very similar biology to humans, she should live another 50 years, assuming she's still alive today. Every year, gray whales migrate all the way up to the rich seas in the Arctic to feed on amphipods and various other critters from the ocean and migrate back to Baja California; it’s a 12,000 mile round trip every single year.

But by pumping so much greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, we've changed the chemistry of the ocean. The largest ecosystem on this planet is now more acidic than ever before, which wipes out the food supply of this population of gray whales. We're now starting to see emaciated gray whales washing up on the beaches of Oregon, Northern California, and Washington, dying of starvation.

They're on the verge of extinction yet again because of something humans have done. I tell you that story because we still have another chance to redeem ourselves and to save this species and so many others by embracing technologies like fuel cells that will get us away from fossil fuels, that will create jobs, that will give us a prosperous future, a strong economy and a strong environment.

That's why, as Secretary of the California EPA, I created the Hydrogen Highway to break that chicken or the egg cycle. Could you get companies to bring fueling stations for vehicles if there were no vehicles? Or could you get car companies and boat companies to bring vehicles if there wasn't a way to fuel? Of course, things were interrupted by the last recession, but fortunately, things are back on track. We now have dozens of stations, thousands of hydrogen vehicles traveling all up and down our highways, and, along with battery technology, it is the future of electric cars

Energy Independence Now was created back in 2000 as a nonprofit designed to help people understand fuel cell vehicles and hydrogen as an energy storage and transportation fuel. Everyone understood batteries—even back then there were electric cars—but nobody understood the fuel cells and hydrogen and its potential.

I want to leave you with something, paraphrasing what Lincoln said in the Gettysburg Address, ‘The world will little note nor long remember what we said here, but it will never forget what we do here.’  Alta Sea is such an important partner in all of this because they're helping to bring the blue economy into the light and making people understand that the blue economy is the economy. Without the ocean, we have nothing. So, whether it's the environment, sustainability of species, or the economy, we need all of the partners here today that made the Energy Observer possible.

Brian Goldstein, EIN

The story of hydrogen is really broad, right? It goes well beyond light duty passenger cars, which is probably what most people here have heard over or even seen on the roads in the last few years. But hydrogen is an energy storage medium for excess renewable energy. 

As you all know, in California we over produce and are forced to curtail energy.  We really need a mechanism, as we race toward 100 percent renewable energy, to be able to store this and keep a town the size of Los Angeles and industries the size of the twin ports here running overnight and on days when we don't have sun and we don't have wind.

Hydrogen plays a huge role in industrial decarbonisation. Sectors like ammonia production for fertilizers, steel, concrete, oil refining are industries that need either a high degree of heating or are already using hydrogen. Simply replacing that with renewable hydrogen will help us decarbonize some of the hardest to reach sectors of our economy, which brings us to transportation.

Everyone's familiar with battery electric vehicles and not as familiar with fuel cell electric vehicles. But at the end of the day, we really only have those two tools in the zero emission toolbox. As Americans, I think we're prone to try to pick a winner and  get behind one technology. But in reality, when we really only have these two options, it would be short sighted of us not to be fully informed and to give both technologies real opportunity for market acceptance.

It's for that reason that I'm really particularly thankful for Terry's work with the state that really encouraged our regulatory community and our policy community to let the market decide. What we’ve seen is this hydrogen technology has taken some years for us to build out a supporting infrastructure, but we're finally starting to see the real diverse applications of this technology. And it couldn't be on display any better than it is today with the Energy Observer. So just very briefly, I'll run you through it.

Hydrogen has the ability to quickly refuel; five minutes for a passenger vehicle or 20 minutes for a heavy duty truck. It's a communal refueling style. Fifty percent of people in California live in multifamily housing and don't necessarily have access to charging or a garage or even a consistent parking space, for that matter. The communal refueling nature of hydrogen is really going to be key to provide equal access to zero emission vehicles across the state.

When you move on up into heavy duty vehicles, we have 17,000 of these trucks in the Twin ports alone. Can you imagine trying to line up 17,000 trucks to plug in and recharge overnight—the electric infrastructure that goes into that and just the sheer logistics of it, not to mention the downtime of the vehicles or the thousands of pounds of batteries that they would have to haul? Hydrogen offers us versatility in the heavy duty space that I think we will see in abundance in the coming years thanks to the new advanced clean trucking rule.

We have these other areas of transportation that are oft overlooked.  But right now, we've got the Energy Observer here, and this is something I couldn't be more excited about. This morning, I showed up in Long Beach, and we took the trip over for about an hour and a half. We passed dozens of large container ships—huge ships that are some of the most polluting vessels in the country, or in the world, for that matter. To know that we have a zero emission option that will let these container ships travel pretty much around the world without having to refuel, to be able to store liquid hydrogen—ideally, renewable hydrogen where we can set up infrastructure, of course, just like this—and enable the shipping industry to operate in a cleaner manner. It's just absolutely fascinating to me.

I look at hydrogen as this Swiss Army Knife of energy carriers. It has all of these amazing applications, very diverse applications. And nowhere is it really better demonstrated than in this boat. The Energy Observer, while it’s sailing, uses solar electricity to desalinate seawater that it uses that to run a fuel cell to propel the boat, completely autonomously, so much so that they sailed for 27 days, from the Galapagos to Long Beach without stopping—no need for fuel. 

It's just absolutely mind blowing to me and really hit home today when we were sailing over, producing all our energy on board with no engine noise and our only emission was water. Right then, these pods of dolphins literally just started popping up around the boat, almost like it was staged for the morning—a very Hollywood moment. So, I'm really thankful that you're able to bring these vehicles and vessels together to demonstrate the versatility of hydrogen and a little bit of what the future has in store for this sector.

The Energy Observer