As you read this at home or at work, you are no doubt surrounded by electronic devices. For a starter, you're online so your computer is drawing power. You may have lights on in the room you're in. You may have just cooked some food or made a hot drink, which required a cooker or kettle.

All those items can used with the simple flick of a switch on dry land. When you're at sea, or even off the beaten track in a motorhome or secluded batch, you realise how hard it is to generate power efficiently and how precious energy is.

For Team Gallagher, generating power on board the Moana for our Trans-Tasman row was a six-month learning and evaluation process which ended with invaluable support from EFOY, manufacturer of fuel cells technology.

Power generation vs consumption
To get the magic number of how much power you have to generate - known as amp hours per day - you need to work backwards by looking at the items that require power, then how much power they require individually and finally how long each day they need to operate for.

Our boat, Moana, has an array of electrical gadgetry onboard. Each one is vital in its own way and is used at different periods.

●      Lights (cabin and navigational) - These are LED lights, so very bright and use absolute minimal power.
●      Autopilot - We aim to use this as much as possible, in some cases 24 hours a day, but it requires a lot of power.
●      Speedometer - This helps us determine our speed through the water (against the GPS which measures speed over the ground). This will be on 24 hours a day.
●      Fleet Broadband System (FBB) - This allows us to connect to the Internet and send back video and images. It will be used for two hours every other day.
●      Laptop - This is the interface between the cameras and the FBB system and will also be required for two hours every other day.
●      SeeMe Radar Reflector - This will be on 24 hours a day. It receives a radar signal from nearby ships and sets off a loud alarm.
●      Watermaker - This is critical and allows us produce fresh water from sea water. It needs to run for two hours each day to produce the 48 litres of water required by four thirsty rowers.
●      Video cameras - These will help capture our journey and will need to be charged off 12v chargers.

That little lot chomps through around 75 amp hours each day. We have a 210 amp hour battery sitting in the belly of the boat, which is only enough for three days worth of power. It’s going to take substantially longer than this to cross the ditch, so we needed to generate additional power to meet our power demands.

The options
Solar energy, through massive solar panels, was first initial area of investigation. Solar technology is now incredibly efficient but even if we covered the entire surface area of the boat with panels and wore solar panel hats, it has one major achilles heal: you can't rely on 12 hours of bright, uninterrupted sunshine day after day during spring in the middle of the Tasman. Our research pulled out a daily estimate of just 7.5 hours of sunlight each day - some days will be less.

We even considered a 1kw Honda generator. While the units themselves are very reliable, the weight of the petrol and space the fuel required was impractical.

The cure
It was a chance visit to a former America's Cup weather man, who now runs a wind forecasting and online tracking device company called Predict Wind, that solved all our issues. Owner Jon Bilger was Weather Manager at Team Alinghi, the two-time America's Cup winners, for 10 years.

While meeting with Jon, we mentioned our power dilemmas, and he immediately directed us to fuel cell technology, as used by Alinghi on their land-based weather stations.

What's a fuel cell?
Fuel cells are the power technology of the future and solved all our power consumption issues in one swoop. Fuel cells convert chemical energy - in our case pure Methanol cartridges - into electricity through a chemical reaction. And they’re very light, just 7.5kg and ridiculously efficient. Our EFOY COMFORT 140 model, the mid performance class in the EFOY fuel cell range, generates a staggering 144 amp hours each day. And with one M10 (10 litre) EFOY fuel cartridge the EFOY fuel cell can provide 925 amp hours before we simply change the cartridge with a new one.

We could power a Plasma TV and beer fridge with that and still have enough in reserve to hook up a few stereos (although we'd have to increase the size of our boat considerably)!

The EFOY unit also has a built in regulator so we can't over-charge the battery and it's very quiet. At full production it only emits 25 decibels, which is the same noise level inside a library. The bi-product is a small discharge of water and the same amount of carbon dioxide that a young child exhales.

This technology will change the way we power any area that's independent of mains power.

Quite simply - it ticked every box - environmentally friendly, reliable, fast and durable while providing an enormous amount of valuable energy at a low weight. We had to get one.

We were fortunate to secure the first EFOY unit that arrived in New Zealand, which was promptly and simply installed on board Moana. We collected three 10-litre Methanol fuel cartridges in Sydney for our jaunt across the Tasman.

To learn more about EFOY fuel cells, contact RV Supplies Limited on 07 846 7771 or online at www.rvsupplies.co.nz or go to www.efoy.com

Special thanks to Kevin Newton and André Ofner for their support and enthusiasm for our project.