A Kiwi-designed boat powered solely by the sun is set to become the first to circumnavigate the globe.
The Turanor Planetsolar has already made it from Monaco to Brisbane, arriving Down Under at a drifting pace yesterday.
"No sun, and the wind was against us, but we managed," said project founder Raphaël Domjan.
Its stop-over is a chance to re-charge following a period of overcast weather, which slowed the Catamaran approach to Australia to just 37 kilometres a day. But its crew said it could cover more than 200km per day without sails or a diesel engine, purely on the sun's energy alone.
The Turanor Planetsolar is powered by 540 square metres of solar panels.
The boat's crew are hoping to prove the reliability of renewable energy.
"It's a kind of promotion for renewable energies and for the use of renewable energies. The idea mainly is to show that it works," said sponsor Immo Stroher.
The boat is the brainchild of Swiss adventurer Domjan and solar technology companies sponsored its $17 million build.
The Kiwi company behind Pete Bethune's "Earthrace", LOMOcean, took on the challenge, with the Turanor being their first solar-powered design.
"Typically a 30 metre motor-yacht might be using 30 to 40 kilowatts just to air condition the boat - we've only got 20 kilowatts to drive the boat along," said Andre Moltschaniwskyj from LOMOcean.
To make most of that power, the team focused on super-slick hull design.
"And that sort of comes back to the New Zealand mentality of designing race yachts. You know a slippery hull is a fast hull, is a fuel efficient - or in this case energy efficient - hull," said Moltschaniwskyj.
"The capital costs might be higher, but then you don't have the high ongoing costs of providing diesel, and infrastructure to provide that diesel, and servicing of diesel engines."
The team are now in talks about using alternative energy for New Zealand ferries.
[It's] making us realise how carelessly, in some ways, we use power," says co-designer Andre Moltschaniwsky.
And we're very much used to how much energy there is - petrol, diesel and the fossil fuels we burn - and as a result we're probably quite wasteful of it."
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