Catamarans are fairly odd-looking boats, but earlier this week a special breed was docked at the North Cove Marina in Lower Manhattan. Alongside the typical handful of South Florida-based yachts that pop up here during the summer was an angular, flat-topped catamaran with a glistening blue deck called the MS Tûranor PlanetSolar. There's a reason why this boat stands out: last year it became the first ship to circumnavigate the globe on solar power alone. The 89,000 kg (nearly 100 ton) ship needs a massive solar array to capture enough energy to push itself through the ocean. An impressive 512 square meters (roughly 5,500 square feet) of photovoltaic cells, to be exact, charge the 8.5 tons of lithium-ion batteries that are stored in the ship's two hulls.
