The third episode of NerdTV interviews Bill Joy, formerly of Sun, who is now designing a large sailboat:
Well it’s an attempt to be, in doing integrated systems design the idea is that a modest number of people living on a sailboat — you know a larger sailboat — is something say more than 100 feet long. Looks like a little island. You have a crew, six, ten crew, five, ten guests. You know ten to 20 people. You’re in a salt water environment and so you have to make fresh water and you have to heat it and keep the place cool and move yourself around and cook and clean and do sewage clean up and pump the bilge and not put oil overboard and create power and not have too much emissions and try to be quiet and not too noisy living right next to your power generation, sewage and all the other treatment plants. So it’s like an island. And so it’s an opportunity to study energy efficiency looking at all the kinds of technology that are available. So for example, if you want to move it around rather than just getting a bigger engine try to figure out a way to make it move with less power and quieter. And rather than putting a big air conditioner try to use better insulation because if you put in a bigger air conditioner you gotta have a bigger generator to run it and bigger fuel tanks to power it.So you start to see the balance between insulation and so on. And so we started this project about a year ago and looked at all the advanced technologies, looked for insulation, windows, heating, cooling, secondary heat recovery fuel cells, bio-medic ideas in propulsion, aerodynamics, plastic teak decking instead of real teak to try and minimize maintenance, lower more energy efficient water making. So basically a survey on the consumption side because really it’s not a factory for much of anything but on the consumption side and the utility side like a water treatment or water making plant, a sewage plant, an electrical plant looking at all those sets of technologies and how they can be done in a more integrated and energy efficient way. So that’s been a pretty big project and we’re almost complete with the design.