You've never seen a boat sail like this - Detours: S. 2 Ep. 3

[Music] sailing is a 7,000 Yee old technology that has been almost completely replaced in the modern world commercial ships are run by Fuel hungry engines which become less economically and environmentally feasible by the moment two San Francisco based entrepreneurs have developed a technology to revive sailing and do their part to save the [Music] world the fair system in San Francisco Bay is very popular the people that use their ferry system either on a normal commute or when we have the emergencies that happened on a periodic basis when the earthquake hit in '89 the Bay Bridge went on of operation the fery systems took over the problem with the fairy systems the way they're currently instituted is they are horrendously in a efficient in terms of diesel use they're also creating a lot of greenhouse gas and it's just not sustainable you can drive your Cadillac Escalade across the Golden Gate bridge and get 19 m a gallon and you be far more environmentally correct than you would be to take the ferry system the way it's currently operated some of these vessels burn 300 gallons an hour there is certainly an overwhelming desire to make fies Greener cleaner more fuel efficient and after all the FES in barrier are government subsidized so if we can save cost it saves taxpayers so it's kind of a win across the board I met Jay I guess 2 years ago and he introduced his his wing project from that moment I guess there was 6 months of design and iterations a lot of different tests to optimize the size of the wing for this test platform and then the actual build took maybe 6 months ready go everybody knows what normal sales are like they're just Fabric and they're essentially one side of a wing the benefit from the wing is that you have two sides and it's a very precise shape so an equal size soft sail and a wing the wing is going to be about twice as effective twice as powerful the wing is 45 ft tall front to back is 10 ft it weighs roughly 600 lb so it's a very very light structure sort of insignificant to the weight of a ferry um and it's potentially very powerful these faeries are traveling along 30 and 40 knots sometimes and I forget the exact number you certainly can produce I think 6 or seven tons of force at full speed if require so the wing also has inside of it a brain it has a GPS system it has a satellite tracking system it has a vessel data recording system it knows where it is it knows where you're going all we have to do is turn the wing on and off the people who drive big ships are not Sailors so there's kind of a discontinuity between windpower systems and the people on the boat who are just not going to use those systems what this Wing does is completely autonomous the crew doesn't need to know anything about the wing or how it works is literally an onoff system we do that by having a Feathering tail system very much like a tail on an airplane controls the pitch and hence the lift we have a vertical tail that controls the wing and hence the power of the wing produces if it can make power for the boat it will do it can't it just feathers and is kind of a benign thing on the ship in a way you could say the the wing is a hybrid system it's not intended to completely replace the motors it is intended to make them as efficient as possible and use the wind to drive the vessel as much as possible the fair and the barri I think they is certainly over a million dollar worth of of fuel per year and there are 25 fairies we've demonstrated we can save you know 30 to 40% of the fuel costs we have proven technology works and is valid and saves Fuel and Emissions it's really hand it over to the to I guess the not certainly the lawmakers but certainly the policy makers we've demonstrated the technology is available are they going to insist that that technology is included in the next generation of fairies I think it's going to become a requirement pretty soon that the the energy standards and and greenhouse gas emissions are going to be you're going to have to show that you're reducing if you can't show that you reduced from what has been done in the past I don't think they're going to allow the technology to some it might be a threat I mean you're going to use less fuel you're probably going to have smaller Motors you're going to do things differently there a Clear Choice you either go the The Dirty diesel route or you can go for a clean tech route the wind's got a tremendous amount of power in it 7 17 quadrillion kilowatt hours of power in the wind in the course of a year it's a it's a number that's unimaginable if there's only a a 1% chance that we're going to seriously damage the conditions of life on Earth that 1% chance is enough for me to say okay we've got to do something here the rest of the universe is 20 mi this way 20 mi up is what the rest of the universe looks like we absolutely have got to stop pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and everything that we can do to change that is what we've got to do [Music] [Music]

Channel: The Verge

Views: 506,183

Keywords: science, hybrid, Saildrones, best sail, boat fuel, news, ship, technology, hybrid wings, the verge, reviews, best boat, san francisco, tech, fuel cost, sea, yacht, ocean, Wind+Wing Technologies, journalism, Photon Composites, entertainment, ferry, culture, green, detours

Id: C_XRWhS7978

Length: 5min 26sec (326 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 10 2014