Sailboats are now used for pleasure rides across the sea or lakes. In the meantime, the industrial sailing had to find a quicker way of shipping stuff so it started burning fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution. The VindSkip however comes to rescue and bring wind power back into action.
Why should we care about that if everyone travels by plane now across the oceans? It’s simple - about 90% of all goods heading to export travel by huge cargo boats burning hundreds of thousands of oil barrels each day.
Norwegian engineer and managing director of Lade AS Terje Lade recently patented a design that promises to change polluting cargo ships into wind-friendly machines that are 60% more fuel efficient and 80% less emitting.
This has to do mostly with the ship’s unusual design, which is taller than normal ones and resembles a wing. Why? Because a boat shaped like that sailing into the wind gets sucked forward by the vacuum formed at its rear end.
Kind of a reverse process from how boats with sails work. By using this principle, cargo ships could give up on those huge powerhouses and get assisted by smaller more efficient engines, maybe ones burning cleaner natural gas.
It sounds cool and all, but this could work only if backed up by sophisticated weather mapping software in order to calculate the ship’s best route, which might sound disarming, but regarding how digital technology is evolving these days, we think this could be doable in a very close future.
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