Technology

Super rich all have crewed boats, so its mostly to do with living space per foot of boat length or them as they just pay their way around the skill issue. Those who do like to occasionally pilot or race their own boat tend to have sailing boats as they are much more rewarding to sail.

The bits that are different between a motor and sail yacht is really just the sails, that part is actually pretty simple to learn (mastering is something else). In mast/boom mains, electric furling head sails, hydraulic or electric winches, all make operating the sails push button.

The navigation and marina skills are the same, if you have bow thrusters. As everything else is at a slower pace, sail boats are easier to get to grips with when under way and new to sailing.

I completely get that not everybody wants to tack their way upwind, but its the pleasure in actually sailing in silence rather than a noisy and smelly motor that is the reward here. That, and the cost saving. I can do two weeks sailing covering hundreds of nautical miles for £50 in fuel for a 40 foot sail boat and that's with having to run the motor as a generator to charge the batteries (charter boats suck for house electrics and solar), vs. £500 ish for a motor yacht.

The dream

So I was talking about hydro generators that go in the water rather than a wind turbine that rely on direct wind. I prefer the former as it doesn't muck up the aero on the boat (sails can rob it of power with their dirty air) nor does it get in the way of the deck space that is often limited on a smaller boat. You could use both but I am not fan of wind turbines except at anchor.

With a normal sail boat its common to have more wind that you can safely handle with the boat, you can use the drag of a hydro generator, which goes in the water only when you need it, to help slow the boat down rather than reefing or reefing as much (intentionally making the sails smaller). As wind is the only thing generating motion for the sail boat, its free energy that you otherwise would not be using.

Motor boats rely on the motor to move them, so any drag means the motor has to work harder, imagine dragging a drogue (water parachute used as an anchor), its the same thing, its no longer free energy and you are actually spending more energy moving the same distance as the hydro generator doesn't generate as much energy as it costs to use. Its the same problem for a wind turbine, as that increases aero rather than water drag for the motor boat, requiring more effort from the motor for the same speed & distance.

Motor yachts would be better switching their engine over energy generation as a generator for recharging the EV batteries. Indeed there are some bigger motor yachts that do exactly this as a backup to their solar and dock derived power.

Sailboats can operate at lower power levels, because their displacement hull is efficient at low speeds. (Where a planeing hull needs higher speeds to get more efficient.) When I had solar electric sail boat, I could motor at 2 knots with no wind using only 500w of solar without touching the battery. I usually ran it at 3.5 knots if there was no wind, which gave me lots of range on battery for a full day on the water.

They also have the sail as a primary power source when there's enough wind, so you don't always need the electric motor. Sometimes, if the wind is strong enough, you can use the water turning the propeller to generate electricity to charge the battery. Or if the wind is light, you can use the motor to add more speed than sail alone, using less battery than using electric alone.

I actually would have typed that into my comment too, but i have no knowledge of how much slower a wind powered boat would travel upwind or how dependent performance would be on wind. I totally understand the need for mechanically powered transportation instead of using wind. My comment is mainly targeted at the misleading comparison.

They have one other advantage: unit price. But Lithium is rapidly catching up, and is already better if you calculate price per lifetime charge cycle.

That's actually kind of genius. It's even made of lead!