I’m as concerned about climate change as anyone, and maybe more than most, but obfuscation and pretengineering does not help us get to a sustainable future.

A good example is the way that electric-drive vendors use horsepower when talking about the diesel engine they want to replace and kilowatts when talking about their offerings.

You see, horsepower and watts measure the same thing: power.

1HP=.7457kW

It’s that simple,

I was triggered to write this by an electric-drive company claiming that installing their serial-hybrid drive—diesel generator driving an electric motor—in a long thin efficient motorboat would save 30% in fuel burn over the standard diesel engine that comes with the boat.

But here’s the smoking gun, they promised 8.5 knots top speed with the generator driving the electric motor, but with the standard diesel that boat can do 18 knots and cruises efficiently at 10.

Yup, all they have done is decrease the power, probably by more than half. Of course that will save fuel.

But here’s the thing, in most usage profiles for cruising boats, simply putting in a right-sized diesel engine and settling for say 9 knots cruise and about 11 knots wide open—still faster than the electric—instead of 18, would almost certainly save more fuel as well as costing way less (think less than half), and weighing less, than an electric motor, generator, and a huge lithium battery bank.

The latter to run silent for an hour or so…and then have to be charged with…the diesel generator, in most cases.

Wait, it gets worse, weight is a killer on a boat like this, making the hybrid setup an even sillier idea since it will weigh way more than the right-sized diesel and so make her even less fuel efficient and take up more space.

What fevered mind came up with the idea that burning diesel to create rotation (generator engine), and then turning that into electricity (generator alternator), and then turning that back into rotation (electric motor), is more efficient than burning diesel to make rotation (diesel engine) in the first place—conversion losses are a bitch (they compound)—one conversion always beats three.

Sure, electric is great, as long as we stay close to a source of renewable produced power, but staying close to the dock is not what people will use this boat for—and no, a practical amount of solar panels are not going to help much.

Which brings us a full circle.

It’s always a danger signal when a sales person talks HP one moment and kW the next. They are probably trying to hide something, and now you know what that is.

And no, there is nothing magical about a horsepower or a watt just because it was produced by an electric motor. The whole torque thing is most-all BS too when applied to cruising boats—great though if you want to get a heavy train moving from a standing start.

More about all this here, including a very cool calculator, which will let you see if your usage profile will benefit from an electric drive. It’s a bit out of date but the basic physics does not change…conversion losses are a bitch…wait, I already said that.