Indian students develop a solar-powered boat to compete in Monaco Energy Boat Challenge

Samaan Lateef

Srinagar, April 30

To advance the progress of renewable technology in the marine sector, an Indian student-based team, for the first time, has qualified for the prestigious Monaco Energy Boat Challenge (MEBC).

A group of 13 engineering students from Kumaraguru College of Technology, Coimbatore, viewed this energy boat challenge as an opportunity to measure India’s sustainable strategies against the world.

“When MEBC sent out calls for the design, we quickly formed a team of four and sent our design. To our surprise, only our design from India got selected. Soon after being selected, we started building the energy boat we initially designed. We will ship this fully electric and solar-based clean energy boat to Monaco in the next two weeks. We will race our boat against popular boat teams from US and Europe,” said Sanaa Mohammed, the project lead.

The annual event will take place in Monaco, the world capital of yachting. Over 20 countries, mostly from Europe, in addition to America and China will converge to create, innovate, and present the future of marine transport.

Mohammed says they had submitted the project in January and in the next two weeks they will ship the boat to Monaco.

The 22-year-old engineering student says clean energy is gaining immense attention only on roadways. The marine and shipping industry is also equally responsible for global climate change crises, which need equal attention, and they aspire to fix that through their innovation.

“Thanks to Elon Musk, electric vehicles are widely spoken of and are a trendy topic, yet the silence about the potential involved in bringing sustainable energy in the sea/marine sector is deafening. We aspire to amplify this issue through our energy boat,” she said.

“This bunch of bright students from Coimbatore have become the first-ever Indian team to qualify for the prestigious Monaco Yacht Club’s Energy Boat Challenge. They are making a solar-powered boat that will compete in Monaco in July this year,” tweeted energy expert Siddhart Singh.

The Indian team will participate in the event’s energy class, which will also see competition in solar and open sea categories.

“Our team is participating in the energy class using Lithium-ion battery as a primary source and solar power as a secondary source of energy to promote sustainability and to use renewable sources of energy,” she said.

The energy source is stored on board to withstand the sea conditions with a Lithium Ferro Phosphate–Prismatic (LiFePo4) energy storage system used as a primary storage device to provide a source of supply for propulsion.

A Mono Perc technology-based flexible solar panels are used to generate more output energy.