Posted at 22nd February 2008 20:29Electric boats
I have long been appalled by aggressive justification of electric marine engines employed by the holier-than-thou brigade of eco-fascists.
Electric boats don’t stack seem to up at any level. Most provide about enough torque to deal with either a decent current or a head wind - but not both together. Their environmental credentials don’t stack up either. An electric motor might be quiet and it may not leave a particulate discharge but they seem to fail on every other count. Contrary to the aggressive, moral arm-twisting applied by eco-fascists (or even discounted river tolls offered for electric engined boats by several, gullible navigation authorities). Environmentally friendly they ain’t. Someone, somewhere’s got to run a power station to make an electric engine work. Someone else has to dig up the rond to run the power to the boats. Worse; a large number of aggressive chemicals are used to produce batteries. Those batteries also have to be recharged when they’re not being used over the winter. Batteries don’t last indefinitely either and when they die, disposal is a major environmental problem. Is this really the system that the eco-fascists have got the brass neck to hector boat-owners over environmental credentials? Taking an overall view, electric engines are almost certainly less environmentally responsible as for example a new, clean diesel or a four stroke outboard.
With admirable and entirely uncharacteristic restraint, I’ve managed to get half way through writing about electric boats without reference to the Effing Raft. In my personal view, this vessel is probably unseaworthy for passenger use on the grounds of difficulty in motoring upwind, fully laden against a strong wind. It’s not solar powered of course – it’s only solar assisted – and has to be plugged into the mains overnight and someone still has to run a power station to make it work. If the solar power system stretches credibility, aluminium hulls are an environmental disaster area. Think open-caste bauxite mining and the huge energy requirements of aluminium smelting.
If the environmental credentials of the Effing Raft are dubious and overshadowed by misleading marketing, we should also consider that the unfortunate craft should and could have been locally designed and built. What always bothered me most of all was how the Effing acquisition costs stacked up. The project was funded by a £50k grant from a landfill charity and the Effing Raft duly acquired with what at the time seemed like indecent haste. At the time, a similar specification vessel was available from the Florida (The Everglades have real sunshine and a number of similar environmental problems) for a UK equivalent of £12k. I never pretended to be a million dollar brain but I think I’ve missed something when things don’t seem to stack up. Apply average freight, insurance and VAT to the cost of the US product and the price still doesn’t get much above £20k. This begs a couple of questions from an old country boy:
i) What happened to the missing £30k?
ii) Why was the acquisition rushed and who did the deal?
It’s enough to make an average, run of the mill eco-fascist choke on his nut cutlets.
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Category: Tourism.