If you are thinking about purchasing a solar electric boat, you might need to wait for a few years before you are able to get a really good one.  Solar boating technology is lagging behind the similar electric technology used in some cars.  That is to be expected however, as even when the internal combustion engine was introduced it was placed into cars well before boats started rolling off the line powered by it.

To give you an idea of just how new some of the solar boating technology out there is, 2007 was the first time that a solar boat was able to cross the Atlantic Ocean.  Not much has changed in the last two years and with very few consumers willing to take chances on the electric boats that are available to purchase, solar boating technology is still far from maturity.

That having been said, there are some decent purchases available on the market.  Just about any seaworthy boat powered by solar energy is powered by the marine solar engine, the one generally seaworthy component that exists.  It uses solar cells to collect sunlight and then convert that sunlight into electricity.  The electricity created is stored in a battery and then used to power a propeller. This is exactly how many other boats work as well with the one difference being that solar energy is the power source.

These early beginnings date back to around 1890, when Europeans were experimenting with powering boats through electricity.  This was a natural logic progression from the discovery of electricity and the knowledge that steam power could move boats forward.  The earliest fully electric boat was the Victory, commissioned in 1905.  It could carry over 300 people at one time, although the solar panels were by no means particularly efficient.  It is debatable to what extent people realized the low efficiency of the solar panels on the Victory, but whatever the case may be it is indisputable fact that the Victory was barely seaworthy.  In fact, it only ever went up and down the Thames River.

The modern history of the solar electric boat probably dates from around 1975 and once again takes place in Europe.  The 1970s were a time of mass innovation in terms of transportation.  This was due to the oil shocks which made the western world realize just how dependant on foreign oil they were.  In the end, the solar electric boat project in the United Kingdom in the 1970s was cancelled because of the resurgence of cheap oil, but it did act as a baseline from which many of the modern attempts at solar boat construction started.