18APRIL 2015 PHOTOS COURTESY UK SAILMAKERS/ALAIN JANETA
lain Janet is pretty talkative these days,
and with good reason. The head of the
UK Sailmakers loft in southern France,
Janet has spent most of his adult life making sails
and working on how to make them better—not
just for sailors, but also for the environment.
Three years ago Janet and the folks at UK
Sailmakers developed an eco-friendly line of
sails known as Titanium Blue, which eliminated
the plastics in the sail by replacing the polyester
and mylar with cellulose-based film and swap-
ping out carbon yarn with yarn made naturally
from basalt.
But Janet wanted to take the environmental
angle and push it a little further. “I wanted to
bring something to the sailor or the racer, and
that is free energy,” he says. This led to the
company’s latest development—Power Sails,
sails built with integral solar panels. “It’s diesel
you don’t put in your tank. It gives you more
autonomy, better range.”
His idea was put to the test last year when
Daniel Ecalard used a Power Sail prototype—a
Titanium Blue mainsail that had been fitted with solar panels—during
the Route du Rhum race. Janet figured a grueling 3,542-mile transatlan-
tic race would be a good testing ground for his new project. “The test is
the conditions of racing, if the sails can withstand the water, the salt, the
rough pounding—there was a lot of rain during the Route du Rhum, and
the storms didn’t affect the charging,” Janet says. “The solar panels and
the electronics didn’t short out. The sail got flogged a lot, and that didn’t
affect the charging either.”
After the success of his prototype, Janet knew he was on to something.
“I shopped around at a couple of yards, but really wanted to work with
one where I knew the owner was thinking on the same wavelength,” he
says. “There were boatyards that said they’d be really interested—once
they know it works. You know, the ‘none of our Euros are going to pro-
totypes’ situation. We had to do all of the R&D on our own with the UK
Sailmakers group, and we had no financial and technical support—it was
homegrown. We kept on trying new products.”
Finally an agreement was struck between UK Sailmakers, Swedish-
based Arcona Yachts and Christian Hallberg, the marketing director at
Oceanvolt, to create a new line of sailboat—the Arcona 380Z (the “Z”
stands for “zero emissions”). “This is not a one-off,” Janet says. “This time
we are working on a production boat with a shipyard. They are going tobe the first professional boatyard launching this new line of boats, boats
outfitted in such a way that they can be autonomous. Arcona is going to
be making a zero-emissions boat.”
But just how much power do these sails provide? “We have to have the
sail generate a kilowatt [83 amps], and I’m confident we can do it,” Janet
says. “It’s a bit of a technical challenge—we have to build a solar setup that
doesn’t chafe on the spreaders, is protected when you reef, etc., but we will
work around these challenges to develop a sail that will last and provide
power for years. We gave the sail a two-year warranty.”
The Arcona 380Z was in the build phase at press time, with the expecta-
tion that it should be launched this spring. By the fall Janet should know
if his project is a success or not. “Next fall it should have been sailing for
a full season,” he says. “But really, the concept of this boat is almost as im-
portant as the boat itself. Other boatyards will follow the trend. Multihull
manufacturers in France are keeping an eye on this.”
You can check out the progress of the boat (what is charging when, how
much power is getting generated, etc.) at the UK Sailmakers website. But
success or failure aside, with the going-green trend as popular as ever, and
the continuous developments in technology that help these dreams be-
come reality, this may just be the tip of the iceberg when it comes to solar
power on sailboats. sSolar power-generating sails
are here at last
by Christopher White
Here Comes
the Sun
Out for a test sail—you can see the solar panels
set in the mainsail (top); cables run down the sail
(right) and through the deck (above left) to the
controller below decksUNDER SAIL
INNOVATION