Something that has never happened before will happen this Friday afternoon. A boat is coming back to Monaco, not any boat, but a solar boat which has been around the world.

You would not understand it looking at it from the pier, because this catamaran is quite high, but looking at it from a heightened viewpoint, you would see that this large boat is entirely “covered” with photovoltaic cells.

The PlanetSolar doesn’t have any other source of energy besides the sun, and that’s how it went all around the world. The boat is 102 feet long and 49 feet wide, with extensions widening it to 69 feet. It has 537 square meters of solar cells (5780 square feet) to power its 120 kW electric motor, but most of the time, it was only using 20 kW of power.

The PlanetSolar will arrive this afternoon in Monte Carlo. We’ve known for a long time that it was possible to travel all around the world with wind energy, we may now add solar energy as another working energy for travelling.