The 60 tonne catamaran has cost 18 million euro ($24.4 million USD) to create at the Knierim Yacht Club in Kiel in northern Germany and will be launched waterside next month with sea trials due between June and September. To achieve to full photovoltaic capture there are solar covered flaps that are extended at the stern and amidships.

SunPower has provided approximately 38,000 of their next generation all black photovoltaic cells, an efficiency of at least 22%, which they believe to be the highest efficiency solar cells commercially available. Maybe it's buried somewhere on the PlanetSolar site, but I missed what storage medium the boat will use once it has harnessed the sun's energy.

The project was conceived by Raphaël Domjan, a 38 year old Swiss , who with Frenchman Gérard d'Aboville, (the first person to successfully row the Atlantic Ocean) will skipper the PlanetSolar around the world next year to showcase the practicalities of photovoltaic technology. Stopovers on the East-West journey are expected to include: Hamburg, London, Paris, New York, San Francisco, Singapore and Abu Dhabi.

Although not intended to replace conventional watercraft, the PlanetSolar team do note that it was boats that allowed the first great explorations of our world. But with the first boat dating back more than 10,000 years we seem to have forgotten how clean such transport can be. "Today," they suggest, "the boat is the most used means of transport of goods. It represents single-handedly almost 1,4 billions of tons of carbon dioxide (in 2008), that is 6% of the total carbon dioxide emissions and twice more than the air transport."