November 9, 2007 4:00 AM PST
Australia's Solar Sailor has come up with a way to turn lightweight solar panels into sails. With this innovation, a ship can be powered mostly by the wind or solar energy, says company founder Robert Dane, rather than diesel. Solar Sailor builds the sails, but someone else builds the boat. A ferry service in Australia owns a boat with eight small sails that does three tours a day in Sydney Harbor. San Francisco's Hornblower has contracted to build a boat (a model of which is pictured here), which Hornblower hopes to put in the water by 2009.
Photo by Michael Kanellos/CNET News.com
Caption by Michael Kanellos
