Northwest Fishing Reports

Now this would make the rivers and lakes much more peaceful. They just need a little more power and range.

http://www.seattletimes.com/business/te ... er-cleaner/

4n6fisher wrote:Now this would make the rivers and lakes much more peaceful. They just need a little more power and range.

http://www.seattletimes.com/business/te ... er-cleaner/

They've been available for serval years, Torqueedo. Kind of marketed to the sailly boat gang. They have some pretty peppy ones. http://www.westmarine.com/buy/torqeedo- ... --12101846. Packs are a little pricy but pack the get home feature......

Electric power for boats is no different than for cars in terms of practicality.

The motor part of it is relatively easy to do, cheaper than a gas engine, far less complicated, more reliable and virtually no maintenance over time - all good so far.

Its the batteries that kill them. They are very expensive if you want a reasonable amount of power and range together and they dont last long if you actually use them much. That makes the over all ownership experience a lot more expensive than a gas power setup over time.

Also, you will never be able to get an equivalent amount of power and duration from an electric setup for anything like the same weight. If you want to get the same power and range to match the 38 gal fuel tank on my boat, you will need a battery pack that weighs easily 10 times as much and costs up to 10 times as much in terms of dollars/mile driven over its life time as using gas.

Battery technology just cant come anywhere near the specific power density that gas has and its a lot more expensive over time.

Unfortunately, there is no new tech on the horizon that looks like its going to change that any time soon. Lots of pie in the sky promises, but nothing real in the pipeline that I have heard of. I keep up with this stuff because of my other hobby - flying electric powered models.

Actually there are already lots of electric boats. Navy has a bunch, most of our ferries. The rub is in the pleasure sector. As Larry said it's the batteries. Boats are different than cars in that the throttle gets set and it doesn't change for long periods of time. It just doesn't change, the motor is asked to output a high amount of torque all the time. So no matter what you do a battery (s) are not going to last very long. In talking with the rep from Torqueedo, the smaller guys, with the battery pack attached will last about an hour at half throttle, or a half at full. They're really designed to get the sailboat out of the harbor. There have been a few electric boat manufactures at previous boat shows. All of them had one problem in common, you can run for an hour then you have to charge for 12. Most of them were loaded with solar cells on the roofs. Batteries just aren't there. Maybe for boats a hydrogen fuel cell making electricity or a tiny nuke....... The concept of electric boats is very exciting as the motors have 100% torque at almost anything above 0 RPM.

Yeah, electric motors have it over internal combustion is almost every way. The Navy and ferry boats that have electric motors dont use batteries except as emergency back up for very short duration, short range, slow going. The old diesel electric subs had huge batteries that took up most of the space in the hull and accounted for something like 75% of the total weight. The true source of the power is diesel fuel for ferries and/or nukes for the Navy.

Solar is another mostly pie in the sky power source as far as every day, practical power for transportation in the real world.

The earth receives roughly 1000 watts of energy from the sun for every square meter on the ground. Thats ONLY at hi noon on a perfectly clear day at the equator. Solar cells are maybe 20% efficient for hi end cells. So you can get roughtly 200 watts from a 1 square meter solar panel. Thats about 1/4 of ONE horsepower for 1 square meter of panels.

For me to get the 115 horse power that I get from my Yamaha outboard, I would need roughly 440 square meters of solar panels on my boat. And then I would only get full power on a bright clear day at hi noon on the equator.

Even if the cells were 100% efficient in converting that sunlight to electricity (which is impossible), I would need 115 square meters of solar panels.

Not practical in any way as a source of direct power.