What will yachts and yachting look like in 2015?
I don’t recall making any comparison between them, maybe you have someone else in mind. And I don’t consider 15C (59F)to be an extreme temperature, it is an international standard. My point is that even the highly vaunted LiFePO4 cells have around a 5 percent per month self discharge rate and it takes power to replace that energy, a charge of any depth counts as a charge cycle and a battery is only good for a finite number of cycles. If diesel fuel vanished at the same rate owners would have a fit. When that 5 percent of energy has to be replaced it will take 6 or 7 percent more to replace it and if that has to come from a diesel then it means that 11 or 12 percent of the vessel’s installed power is used each month just to stand still. I might be off by a bit but I really don’t see hybrid propulsion becoming a major player in the large yacht business by 2015. It is too expensive, it is far from “green” by any measure, and it is just plain old fashioned inefficient since in all but very
