Gadgetory

yeah sailing is a 7,000 year 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 to San francisco-based entrepreneurs have developed a technology to revive sailing and do their part to save the world the ferry system in San Francisco Bay is very popular the people that use the ferry system either on a normal commute or when we have the emergencies that happen on a periodic basis when the earthquake hit an 89 the Bay Bridge went on an operation the ferry systems took over the problem with the ferry systems our way they're currently instituted is they are horrendously inefficient 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 miles per gallon and you'd 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 ferries greener cleaner more fuel efficient and after all the frozen barrier our government subsidized so if we can save costs to save taxpayers so it's kind of a win across the board I met Jay I guess two years ago and his juices his wedding project from that moment I guess there was six months of design iterations a lot of different tests to optimize the size of the wing for this test platform and then the actual build took maybe six months 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 sized soft sail and a wing the wing is going to be about twice as effective twice as powerful the wing is 45 feet tall from the back is 10 feet it weighs roughly 600 pounds so it's a very very light structure sort of been significant to the way the ferry and its potential e very powerful these ferries are traveling along 30 and 40 knots sometimes and I feel the exact number I certainly can produce something six or seven tons of force at full speed if required 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 that drive big ships are not sailors so there's kind of a discontinuity between wind power systems and the people on the boat or 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 on/off system we do that by having a feathering tale system very much like a tail on an aeroplane controls the pitch and hence the lift we have a vertical tail that controls the wing and hence the power the wing producers if it can make power for the boat it will do they can't it does feathers and is kind of a benign thing on the ship in a way you can say that 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 ferries Newbery I think they use certainly over a million dollars worth of fuel per year you know 25 ferries we've demonstrated we could save now 30 to 40 percent of the fuel costs we have proven technology works and is valid and says fuel and emissions it's really handed over to them - I guess then also the lawmakers were certainly the policy makers we've demonstrated the technology is available are they going to insist that technology is included in the next generation of ferries I think it's going to become a requirement pretty soon that the energy standards 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 basically a choice you either go that the dirty diesel route or you can go for a clean tech route the winds got a tremendous amount of power in it with 17 quadrillion kilowatt hours of power in the wind in the course of a year it's a number that's unimaginable if there's only 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 miles this way 20 miles 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