Eco-friendly and customer-driven Sail plan optimisation service

ended

The overall vision is to bring our patented EcoSail technology to full market maturation, to pilot the system and to arrive at its commercialisation as a new energy efficiency and cost-effective solution for the global maritime transport market. Our innovative route planning service will be a disruptive new market entry, reducing fuel consumption by at least 7%. EcoSail is rooted in the clear market-pull caused by the industry need to increase its cost efficiency and decrease environmental impacts. It is the result of several EU-funded R&D projects (SpaceNav, Navtronic & Sectronic) leading to a verified and demonstrated prototype (at TRL7) and confirming the commercial and economic viability. In these projects, the SMEs (OSM, GMS, ONL) developed a roadmap for technical improvements and a strategic business plan on entering the global maritime transport market. The EcoSail project approach is to execute these plans; technically advance EcoSail to TRL8 (WP1) and qualify the service in real-life operations to reach TRL9 (WP3). To support commercial viability, we will conduct a range of market maturation activities in WP4-5 and secure a dedicated EcoSail 'Training Academy' for future maritime masters, users and commercial staff (WP2). We bring together a strong consortium, the three lead SMEs with deep industry knowledge have teamed up with the world-class RTO, CHA, specialising in EO data and maritime training simulations, and a large offshore industrial target user (LAM), to successfully market launch and scale the ground-breaking EcoSail service platform. EcoSail will create a measurable consortium impact - as accumulated revenues of €87.1m for the 5-year post-project (2020-24), with accumulated gross profit of €44m and employment growth of 95 FTEs, and 80 FTEs in our value chain. Further, we will enable between €1.4bn to 2.7bn in reduced costs for our clients and decrease their CO2 emissions by 11m tonnes and their SOx emission by 0.3m tons.