It strikes me that almost all of the conversion projects that people are involved with are on boats with slow hull speeds that make the mild horsepower less attractive and make the regen argument a non-starter. This reminds me of electric car conversions that started with a heavy antiquated chassis because it was available cheaply. Poor performance in the cars and boats is the result.
To get efficiency, we must look at the whole system approach, and that starts with the boat we will convert. Weight and hull form (inextricably connected) must be prime considerations. The cheap hulks that we cram our lovely electronics into perhaps don’t deserve the upgrade as they will disappoint with short range and low average speeds.
The regen situation puts this in high relief, because getting a boat in the 8-12 knot range is easy today if you use modern designs and engineering. Often this means going to an unballasted boat (usually a multihull) but it surely means advanced building techniques to keep the structure with little wave inducing drag. With the higher sailing speeds easily produced, the regen suddenly makes sense. Cheers
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Jace Hobbs
P: +64 3 5451122
M: +64 21 051 1666
www.electricbikehub.co.nz
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