NEWS
Wider goes greener
Wider CEO Marcello Maggi has committed to take the Italian superyacht builder all electric within five years. The company is well positioned for it, having already delivered two innovative hybrid yachts and now with the resources to push boundaries since its recent acquisition. At the BOAT International Superyacht Design Festival ( ), Maggi revealed new areas of development. Through Wider’s parent company, it is revisiting an old technology that shows renewed promise with the introduction of graphene, the super-thin, super-strong and super-conductive material. Wider intends to use thermionic converters (TCs) as part of the hybrid system that will power the Wider 180 currently under construction. TCs transform heat into electricity through the transfer of electrons between metal plates. Although they showed great promise as reliable, stable, low-maintenance sources of electricity and were used as a source of power for satellites, TCs used to have a poor conversion rate.
