Building the ships, fusing hardware and software

To answer this hypothesis, I first started with what we already had. What would it require to make a sailing ship that created energy, using technology that I could buy off the shelf? Fortunately, a lot of the equipment we needed was available—the advantage of operating in an industry that has been around for thousands of years and has reached peak innovation over the past decade. 

The bit that was missing was critical: something that could help us follow the wind. This is how we came to developing the world’s first weather routing algorithm, allowing our vessel to autonomously navigate and follow the wind. We call it the ‘Goldilocks Algorithm’, searching for weather that’s not too strong, not too weak, but just right. 

This essentially gave us two different products to develop—the hardware of the ship itself, and the software for the routing algorithm. And really, you can’t separate one from the other. If you change the design of the vessel, it changes the algorithm needed to sail that vessel; and vice versa, if you change the algorithm, you need to change the design of the ship. This created a new level of complexity as we began to develop the concept. 

What soon became apparent to me was that this fusion of hardware and software was advantageous. The proprietary software we were developing wasn’t just serving the hardware, it was actually dictating its development. It became part of the design loop, guiding a lot of the difficult decisions we were making about the design and performance of the ship, helping us reach optimised outcomes before we even started building it. 

As we continue to develop the DRIFT vessels, one key mantra has stuck—‘anything that makes the ship go greener’. If we’re inventing a new class of renewable energy, then let’s make it a good one. 

In terms of the hardware, this means taking weight out of the vessel to make it lighter, it means adjusting the design to make it higher performance and therefore faster, generating more energy. It means thinking about how we can ensure that all our materials are circular. As a sailing ship, there are no diesel engines: and now, pending approval, I have a vision that we’ll have no fossil fuels on board. 

Even the routing algorithm is designed with the environment in mind. Not only does it know exactly where to go, it knows where not to go: like conservation areas, known migration routes, sargassum clusters, and so on. In every sense, we want this to be a net positive vessel. 

Targeting the most remote communities

One of the main things that has changed since I founded DRIFT has been our target audience. From the outset, with our focus on creating a new renewable energy class, we were looking at domestic and European markets. 

Once we got into understanding the energy transition, I realised that the communities facing the greatest challenges were those small, developing, coastal or island nations. These countries were not only at the forefront of climate change and extreme weather, but they also had scarce access to reliable, clean energy.

As an ocean-based form of power, we could serve these communities really well. We can help these communities at the fringes of the energy transition to build a stronger basis for power. And this isn’t a stretch of the imagination either—these islands are already bringing in energy via ship, it just happens to be coal, diesel, or LNG, rather than green hydrogen.

As we’ve started speaking with more remote coastal communities and island nations, we’ve realised there is a much greater opportunity than just generating sufficient energy for their own grid. DRIFT is in fact making green energy an export consideration for these economies. Take Antigua and Barbuda, which is 99.6% ocean by economic area: that’s a huge opportunity to become a net green energy exporter. 

Honing our narrative: Keeping it simple

One of the hardest things about building hardware is the need for considerable, catalytic funding to turn designs into reality. Fundraising is central to any founder, but even more so for climate tech hardware founders—and often requires even more of a leap of faith. 

One thing I’ve learned is to keep things as simple as possible. 

For instance—people often look at the designs for our boat, and say, “Wow, that looks really cool.” As exciting as that is for us, it’s not particularly helpful for fundraising. Investors look for precedent: they look for evidence that it’s doable, or been done before. 

So when I speak to investors about DRIFT, I tell them it’s a sailing vessel, and we’ve had those for years. That we already have boats powered by hydrogen, we’ve just simply taken that and engineered it in reverse. Our routing algorithm is one aspect that really stands out—but even so, the proliferation of AI over the past few years has demonstrated to investors that these algorithms once considered probable are now highly possible. So basically, everything we’re doing has been done in aggregate, we’re just the first to engineer it all together. 

The other thing I show to investors is that DRIFT is a technology of now—that if we had tried to do this 10 years ago, we would have failed. There simply weren’t the number of manufacturers producing wind assisted ships that we could choose sail plans from, and we wouldn’t have access to the sort of expertise and computing to enable us to design this as quickly as we have. We wouldn’t have had the data or compute power to run the routing algorithm. Moreover, the hydrogen economy is much more developed than it was a decade ago. 

I fundamentally believe that we’re building this vessel at a critical point in the progress curve—as I see it, all the critical components for this to be a success, for us to have fleets of our clean energy sailing ships navigating the oceans, are moving in the right direction.