Translator: Translate TED Reviewer: Sebastian Betti
Have you ever asked yourself about the question of knowing
how your clothes, your belongings, your cell phone,
your TV, your hat,
were brought to you?
By plane?
No, it's by sea!
90 percent of the world trade is done by boats.
This is a huge amount!
The plane is 2 percent.
As we speak, there are 50,000 ships
travelling through the ocean.
Often we imagine that the sea is an empty space.
Well no, not at all!
The North Sea,
the Channel, they are extremely crowded!
There are boats everywhere!
This is both good news and bad news.
This is good news because the shipping
is the means of transport which produces
the least CO2 transported per kilogram.
For a plane it would be sixty times more.
And it is bad news
because in proportion of the huge volume
it means a lot of CO2.
It is the the 5th largest producer of CO2 emissions,
This is equivalent to what Germany emits in one year.
In addition, the diesel engines of these vessels
also release fine particles,
as much as half of all the vehicles on Earth,
nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide.
So this is not terrible at all.
And it's even worse because in 2050 --
and 2050 is tomorrow --
the world trade will double!
So it really is urgent to do something now.
So obviously, there is the change in current legislation that will require
to use better refined oil.
We also think to use natural gas as an alternative fuel.
But this is not enough.
We must go even further. This is clear.
The wind could be an option.
For thousands of years,
men have always managed a way
to use their huge creativity
to try and take advantage of this free,
clean, ubiquitous energy
but, we are not going to go back to sailing!
Saling is a little bit complicated.
It takes a dedicated crew
and then the sails,
they must be replaced since they wear out.
The caravels of Christopher Columbus or the Clippers
who raced to bring tea and spices back from East
are part of history.
What is needed is to find something powerful,
effective and simple,
really simple.
A wind-powered engine.
I like that name,
because it reflects what we have to do.
It brings together two words from different universes.
The engine,
which means it is simple to use, it is powerful,
and then the wind energy
we need to get hold of, the wind.
In fact, this research is not very new.
It began in 1924 when a German, Anton Flettner,
equipped a three masts of two large cylinders.
These cylinders were capable of rotating on themselves.
If we imagine a boat with a crosswind,
the rotation of these cylinders
creates a forward propulsion force.
The boat, which was renamed Baden Baden,
crossed the Atlantic Ocean
in 1926.
The cylinders are named after their inventor:
they are Flettner rotors.
So how does it works?
It is a principle that has been highlighted by Gustav Magnus,
in the mid 19th century.
It is quite simple.
I think you have all sort of experienced it
upon playing Ping-Pong, tennis or even bowling.
When you throw a ball by spinning it on itself,
putting topspin on it, giving it spin,
you see that the trajectory is bent into a curving motion
because the ball is deflected by the Magnus force.
That's how it works.
In 2008, the Enercon company specialized in wind turbines
launched a ship 130 meters long,
equipped with 4 Flettner rotors of 25 meters in height,
to be used as an assistance for the main engines
and were meant to save about 30 percent of fuel consumption
on rather long trips.
And then there is another story.
You all know the Commander Cousteau.
In 1980, the Commander Cousteau asked Professor Malavar
and Dr. Charrier, to try and improve this idea.
They created an invention.
The turbo sail.
Instead of a rotating cylinder, we suck up the air flow
and this causes the propulsive force.
After a few years of testing,
the captain Cousteau built Alcyone with which, in 1985,
he crossed the Atlantic.
Both of these principles are very interesting
but they have a small problem.
They use an auxiliary energy source
to operate their main aerodynamic.
More recently, the company Skysail
has developed a kite.
It is an automatically piloted kite
for, once again, to be an assistance to the propulsion.
This is not a small kite
like the ones you can see on the beaches!
This is a huge kite.
This one is 320 m², the size of a very big flat really!
The kite has got the advantage
of taking very little space on the deck.
But it is rather complicated to use
and it doesn't work in all conditions.
Then, you need to replace the nets, much like the sails.
There is a fourth idea.
This is the articulated wing.
This is an wing from a plane on the deck of a boat.
The first one who came up with this idea,
it is Manfred Curry, in 1930.
He is one of the precursors
of hydro and naval aerodynamic.
The first time it was manufactured in very big size,
it was for the 33rd America's Cup, in 2010.
It had a wingspan of 68 meters!
This is larger than the wing of an A380 Airbus
It's really big!
The wing consists of two elements.
A main element and a component of the same length.
Between the two, there is a small gap.
The air passes through the gap
and the air comes out and sticks
to the other components.
A symmetrical wing flap develops a propulsive force,
which is more than two times than a conventional sail and allows to use
a better angle for the wind to come back up.
This wing is equipped with sensors
connected to a navigation unit
that compares the received information
to a theoretical calculated basis,
and depending on the direction you want to take,
the navigation unit sends adjustment instructions
directly to the wing.
There is nothing to do. Everything is automatic.
Just do not forget to watch the wind.
And then it happens that there is not a lot of wind.
Often here in Cannes, this is the case.
Not today, but often this is still the case.
And then we can work with both ways.
We put a little bit of assistance on the main engines.
The speed ​​produced, at some paces,
will combine itself with the wind speed
and increase the propulsive force on the wings.
We made several simulations on different boats,
for different routes,
always using real weather data,
in order to stick to reality.
We noticed that depending on the itinerary,
we could gain between 30 and 70 percent
of fuel consumption.
This is significant and very promising.
I am aware that this will not be able to work for all boats
nor for all goods;
some must be transported more quickly than others,
nor for all areas of navigation.
Some weather are extremely unfavorable.
Anyways, I am convinced
that there are many cases where this could be very good.
Take for example a liner.
It would be great to go on a cruise,
pushed by the winds, in silence,
in harmony with the elements,
leaving a clean wake.
The wing surface of the liner
could be coated with photo-electric cells.
The electricity produced could make
an important contribution to the energy on board.
Fishing is also concerned.
Some fishing require that boats travel 1500 to 1800 km.
That's a lot.
When they return to port,
the bill fuel represents 40 to 50 percent of the costs!
Can you imagine if we could gain
only 30 percent of this budget?
For the small hand made ships, that would be terrific.
The economic interest directly meets the ecological interest.
Closer to here, yachting.
A rigging like that on a yacht --
and it's no longer necessary to be an expert sailor
and do acrobatics on the unstable boat deck!
It would finally be the opportunity to use the wind
for those you usually, navigate with engines.
They could exchange their speed
and their bill of fuel costs
against the silence and the respect for the sea.
And here you see very often these huge yachts.
Do you know that right now
there is four sailing yacht over 100 meters under construction?
The four big ones.
The wind-powered engine would be a great solution.
In addition, these boats
are almost the length of small commercial vessels.
Their owners could finance and develop
these innovative technologies,
be the precursors,
pave the way for others.
What I wanted to say is that for over 4,000 years,
sailors have played with the wind.
And then, the steam engine arrived
in the mid 19th century.
They forgot about the wind.
In this super-technological era of today,
sailors will have to use the wind again.
The wind-powered engine
is innovation that inspires progress,
which is part of the history
between the past and modernity
or the benefit of the planet, the sea and men.
Thank you.
(Applause)