BizClik Media and Sustainability Magazine CEO Glen White had first-hand experience aboard a luxurious, environmentally-friendly yacht made by SAY Carbon Yachts.
The business, founded in Germany, produces cutting-edge, technologically advanced yachts, which are built using carbon fibre. Featuring three luxurious yachts – the SAY 29 (E), SAY 42 and SAY 52 – the business prioritises comfort, luxury and sustainability. While enjoying a trip to Ibiza, Spain, White got up close and personal with the SAY 42.
SAY 42: Ultra-low-emission engines combined with maximum comfort
Boasting low emissions and high performance, the SAY 42 demonstrates that stylish, luxurious and sustainable boating is possible – even for those who want to enjoy the seas with their family and friends
The SAY 42 is equipped with two certified ultra-low-emission V8 engines (860 hp) that consume up to 50% less fuel compared to conventional motor yachts, all while maintaining the same renowned performance.
The SAY 42 is ideal for those who appreciate extravagance. Each yacht is characterised by a modern design, featuring striking and unique lines and is equipped with state-of-the-art technology, including a digital cockpit, Seakeeper 2 stabilisers, pop-up showers, a retractable table and an owner’s cabin with a fully-equipped bathroom.
To ensure the yachts meet the highest possible sustainability standards while continuing to ooze luxury, CEO Karl Wagner, maintains control over every aspect of the manufacturing process. Every SAY Carbon Yacht is meticulously crafted to bring the customer’s vision to life, designed to be user-friendly while promoting maximum comfort.
SAY Yachts leading carbon fibre adoption
While working with his previous business, Carbo Tech, Wagner became a leading producer of carbon-fibre-reinforced components for the automotive industry. Its customer base included prominent names from Formula 1, including Aston Martin, McLaren and Porsche.
The numerous advantages of carbon fibre have led to its widespread popularity in various industries, including aviation, construction and motorsports. As pioneers in the pursuit of lightweight design, Wagner and his team demonstrate their expertise in manufacturing innovative motor yachts by utilising the properties of carbon fibre.
“Our expertise in lightweight constructions enables us to achieve a unique combination of acceleration, design and agility while lowering fuel consumption and extending range,” Wagner comments.
Consequently, SAY Yachts has emerged as an international, established manufacturer of luxury motor boats, offering only the highest quality available.
In five years, operating a coal or natural gas power plant is going to be more expensive than building wind and solar farms. In fact, according to a new study by Bloomberg New Energy Finance, building a new solar farm is already cheaper than operating coal and natural gas plants in many regions of the world.
Yet a full shift to intermittent energy sources desperately calls for low-cost, reliable energy storage that can be built anywhere. Some nascent startups believe the answer lies in the process that lights up toaster coils by electrically heating them to scorching temperatures.
Antora Energy in Sunnyvale, Calif., wants to use carbon blocks for such thermal storage, while Electrified Thermal Solutions in Boston is seeking funds to build a similar system using conductive ceramic blocks. Their vision is similar: use excess renewable electricity to heat up the blocks to over 1,500°C, and then turn it back to electricity for the grid when needed.
To beat the cost of the natural gas plants that today back up wind and solar, storing energy would have to cost around $10 per kilowatt-hour. Both startups say their Joule heating systems will meet that price. Lithium-ion batteries, meanwhile, are now at approximately $140/kWH, according to a recent study by MIT economists, and could drop to as low as $20/kWH, although only in 2030 or thereafter.
Blocks made from graphite or ceramics (akin to the concrete blocks pictured here) may be a promising medium for thermal storage of renewable energy generated by intermittent solar and wind energy sources. SOURCE: ALAMY
Justin Briggs, Antora’s co-founder and Chief Science Officer, says he and his co-founders Andrew Ponec and David Bierman, who launched the company in 2018, considered several energy-storage technologies to meet that goal. This included today’s dominant method, pumped hydro, in which water pumped to a higher elevation spins turbines as it falls, and the similar new gravity storage method, which involves lifting 35-ton bricks and letting them drop.
In the end, heating carbon blocks won for its impressive energy density, simplicity, low cost, and scalability. The energy density is on par with lithium-ion batteries at a few hundred kWh/m3, hundreds of times higher than pumped hydro or gravity, which also “need two reservoirs separated by a mountain, or a skyscraper-sized stack of bricks,” Briggs says.
Antora uses the same graphite blocks that serve as electrodes in steel furnaces and aluminum smelters. “[These] are already produced in 100 million ton quantities so we can tap into that supply chain,” he says. Briggs imagines blocks roughly the size of dorm fridges packed in modular units and wrapped in common insulating materials like rockwool.
“After you heat this thing up with electricity, the real trick is how you retrieve the heat,” he says. One option is to use the heat to drive a gas turbine. But Antora chose thermophotovoltaics, solar cell-like devices that convert infrared radiation and light from the glowing-hot carbon blocks into electricity. The price of these semiconductor devices drops dramatically when made at large scale, so they work out cheaper per Watt than turbines. Plus, unlike turbines that work best when built big, thermophotovoltaic perform well regardless of power output.
Antora Energy’s graphite blocks store renewably-generated energy at temperatures exceeding 1000º C, eventually converting that back to electricity via their proprietary thermophotovoltaic heat engine. Source: ANTORA ENERGY
Thermophotovoltaics have been around for decades, but Antora has developed a new system. Richard Swanson, one of the company’s advisors, was an early pioneer of the technology in the late 1970s. The efficiency with which the devices convert heat into electricity was stuck in the 20s until the Antora team demonstrated a world-record 30% efficiency in 2019. They did that by switching from silicon to higher-performance III–V semiconductors, and by using tricks like harnessing lower-energy infrared light that otherwise passes through the semiconductor and is lost. Antora’s system recuperates that heat by placing a reflector behind the semiconductor to bounce the infrared rays back to the graphite block.
The technology has caught on. Antora has received early-stage funding from ARPA-E and is an alum of the Activate entrepreneurial fellowship program and Shell/NREL GameChanger accelerator program. More recently, they have gotten funding from venture capitalists and the California Energy Commission [PDF] to scale up their technology, and will build a pilot system at an undisclosed customer site in 2022.
Electrified Thermal Solutions, which is part of Activate’s 2021 cohort and was founded in 2020, is much younger. The company’s cofounders Joey Kabel and Daniel Stack chose ceramic blocks as their thermal storage medium. Specifically, honeycomb-shaped ceramic blocks used today to capture waste heat in steel plants. Since ceramics don’t conduct electricity, they dope the bricks to make them conductive so that they can be electrically heated to 2,000°C.
Stack says they plan to target a wide market for that stored heat. They could use it to drive a gas turbine for electricity, or to run any other high-temperature process such as producing cement and steel.
The duo is still working out some technical challenges such as keeping the ceramic from oxidizing and vaporizing over time. Eventually the system should have a lifetime of 20-plus years, another big advantage over batteries. They are now building a benchtop prototype, Kabel says, but the final full-scale system should look like a large grain silo that should store about 1 MWh/m3, besting Antora’s energy density.
It will be a few years before either company is ready to build a full-scale installation.
If they can prove themselves, though, these companies could pave a way for a cost-effective storage technology for the 21st century electrical grid. “We want to decarbonize the industrial and electric sector by replacing the combustion process with a renewable heating system,” Stack says.
