If it is experienced, the boater immediately notices that this boat is not like the others. It’s all in the shape of the engine, at the stern: thinner, and obviously lighter. The particular sign of the 100% electric boats that we are starting to see along the coasts. It was at the end of 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic, that two entrepreneurs from Barcelona took the plunge, François Jozic, co-founder of Brunch Elektro, and Mathieu Quintart, founder of the platform form of tourist real estate Cocoon Holidays.
Dreaming of owning a clean and quiet boat, they were surprised to only have the choice between an electric walnut shell and a powerful boat, certainly, but at an astronomical price. With in both cases a gasoline emergency engine. The two men said to themselves that there was a market to conquer, with all-electric boats “elegant, efficient and affordable”. They then launched the Magonis company, a nod to the original name of the port on the island of Menorca, in the Balearic Islands (Spain). Catalog entry price: 45,000 euros.
“For the moment, the decarbonization of maritime transport is mainly a matter of marketing”estimates Aurelio Alarcon, technical director of Magonis. “The big shipbuilders are experimenting with lots of things, while still retaining combustion propulsion. We, with our boats powered exclusively by batteries, bear witness to the very beginning of a new era which will revolutionize the sector, as mobile telephony experienced twenty years ago. » In the Catalan start-up’s workshop, in the suburbs of Figueras, in the province of Girona (Spain), five boats are being finished. They measure 5.50 meters long and their motor, depending on the model, offers a power of 6, 12 or 35 kilowatts. Enough to sail at a maximum speed of 22 knots (around 40 km/h). By reaching a speed of 8 or 9 knots, the boat has an autonomy of four hours. Not enough to go around the world…
It must be said that maritime transport, responsible for nearly 3% of global CO₂ emissions, almost as much as air transport, have fallen behind schedule. Ten years after the car and the plane, the boat, absent from the 2015 Paris agreement on climate change, is just becoming aware of the effort it will have to make. “It is a sector which, for a long time, was not regulated, due to its international nature”, recalls Inesa Ulichina, specialist in the decarbonization of maritime transport at the non-governmental organization Transport & Environment. Key auxiliaries of globalized trade, like trucks, freight ships transport 80% of the planet’s goods and today there are nearly 110,000 plying the seas, according to the application which tracks global maritime traffic in real time, MarineTraffic.
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