Electricity Junkies.

We are addicted to it. Me, Radu, our society, we all love electricity. The majority of sustainable energy effort goes towards replacing energy from fossil fuels with electrical energy. Rarely have I seen a community without it.

In Bahía Magdalena rattled and huffed a ginormous diesel generator until midnight to supply the town with lights and TV. Tonight in Bahía Aqua Verde I only hear the waves splashing onto the beach and dogs barking far away. The full moon and a couple of anchor lights on neighboring boats is all the light I see. How refreshing, but ‘How do they do it?’ I ask myself as I type into my backlit tablet. How does one live these days without a multitude of electronic devises? On our walk through the village we had seen some solar panels, satellite dishes and one generator, which is not being used tonight. We run everything on the boat on 12V while under way and at anchor. At the marinas we have shore power with the mighty 110V. That is the time when we use power tools, the sewing machine and a huge fan, because there isn’t much airflow in marinas.  

What I know so far is that we on the boat are totally dependent on electronics. We have three solar panels totaling 280 watts and that covers the fridge (tiny freezer unit), the water pressure pump, all fans, all LED lights, AIS transponder and charging two tablets and two smart phones. And we still run low in the winter with less sun hours, if we don’t recharge the batteries in the evening for one hour by running the diesel motor or generator. The engine/ generator also runs, while the water maker is going or while we are working on the desktop computer and hard drives, so now we are trying to do all of it in that one hour.

So, what does one do at night without electricity? Write with pen on paper or read a book under the beam of a solar light? Going to bed with the sun or shortly after sunset, is the solution I can think of. While sailing there is the same problem. How do we supply enough energy to the batteries when the sails are partly covering the solar panels while the radar, chart plotter and tablet with the electronic navigation charts all want power? We have to motor sail at least for one hour every eight hours when using the radar all through the night.

I am not surprised that a modern lifestyle and what cruisers nowadays desire cannot be supported on a boat by solar power alone. Some boats have wind generators as well as solar panels, as winds blow mostly at night, so that they top off their batteries day and night. Or others transform their boats into a floating solar panel Christmas trees. It’s not easy to keep your boat from looking like shopping cart! Some people turn off their fridges at night and keep things chilled during that time with frozen ice packs. Some took all systems off the boat and cruise old school with sextants, paper charts and celestial navigation. Hats off to those.

Electronics have made modern cruising possible and that a somewhat normal people like us and not only hardcore adventurers can go cruising. I wish one day we can take all that stuff off we rely on heavily now, and probably by that time electronics need way less energy, batteries quadrupled their capacities and solar panels have evolved to very high energy output.

We will have electrical motors on boats, which recharge batteries while sailing as propellers act as charging turbines. This is already possible for short distance motoring, day sails and weekend cruises. Hybrid systems, like the ones for cars, exist for boats as well. For long distance cruising we would have needed 16 car batteries to replace the power of the diesel we have now, which would have added way too much weight for the boat to sail even without the very heavy diesel engine. A sales person came aboard the Imagine for a consultation and saw that we have a practically new diesel engine (link). He advised us to wait for better batteries to be developed and our engine to do its job for a while, as we would also loose the installation value if we were to rip out the new engine. Wasn’t time yet for the Imagine to go electric. Judging by what we have heard, boaters are very slow to embrace electric motors as a valuable alternative. Some kids we follow on YouTube Sailing Uma (link), put the electrical engine of a forklift into their boat and are doing great on their east coast cruises. Or maybe we can adapt this bicycle-generator (link) to the boat?!

It is still night in Bahía Aqua Verde. What do the villagers at night? Sleep? Talk to each other? Iceland got their first TVs and TV station in the early 1970s and has a Nobel Prize winner in literature. The connection seems obvious. People sat together at night, talked and told stories. Can we be like Aqua Verdians again? Possibly not because once we have tasted the apple there might be no way back. My electronic addiction is kicking and screamingly telling me not to go on detox. No, no, no.

Sailing Uma, a young sailing couple, talk on their youtube channel about the installation of their electric motor link