The New Yorker:

Energy Observer, a ship equipped with solar panels and a hydrogen fuel cell, has spent the past seven years circumnavigating the globe, powered by sun, water, and salads.

By Adam Iscoe

One phrase that describes New York’s waterways is “diesel-powered”: supersized container ships, megayachts, oil tankers, garbage barges. But not every ship that comes to town is on a Greenpeace watch list; there are also schooners, plus the odd outrigger canoe. And recently a hundred-foot-long former racing catamaran from France, which had been retrofitted with solar panels and a hydrogen fuel cell, docked near Wall Street. The vessel, known as Energy Observer, resembled a sperm whale that had been wrapped in roughly ten thousand photovoltaic cells. She made a two-week pit stop during a seven-year, around-the-world voyage, gathering some fresh vegetables, before setting sail again, at dawn.

“We’re having a little issue with the batteries this morning,” Beatrice Cordiano, an Italian scientist aboard the craft, said on the day of departure. Energy Observer was to travel up the East River, through Long Island Sound toward Massachusetts, and across the Atlantic, in the direction of the French coast; her more than sixty-two-thousand-mile journey would return to where it began, in 2017, in Saint-Malo. “It’s a problem that we usually do not have,” Cordiano said of the batteries. Just about everything on the vessel—two electric engines, a washing machine, the Starlink satellite hookup, a seawater desalinator, two refrigerators, several MacBooks, a G.P.S. navigation system, lights—is powered by four lithium-ion batteries, which are recharged by a couple of thousand square feet of solar panels, and a hundred and thirty-seven pounds of hydrogen gas. The gas, which is produced using seawater, is stored in eight pressurized tanks.

Here’s how it works: In the hulls, seawater is desalinized and purified, before an electrolyzer splits H2O into hydrogen and oxygen. After that, the hydrogen gas is converted into electricity, via a custom-built Toyota fuel cell—a version of the technology inside the company’s hydrogen-powered sedan, which emits water vapor instead of exhaust.

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