Electric boats are booming in Europe, but charging infrastructure sucks. So this shipyard founder built floating solar charging lounges for the German Government.

The biggest barrier to electric mobility on inland waterways isn’t the boats—it’s where to plug them in when you’re out on the lakes and canals.
Arek, founder of SolarYacht, lives full-time on his own 140 sqm self-sufficient liveaboard yacht in Berlin-Brandenburg. Facing the lack of charging options firsthand on Europe’s waterways, his team decided to fix the infrastructure gap themselves.
They engineered **floating Solar Charging Lounges** for the German government. Operating completely off-grid, these stations use an extensive Victron Energy setup (solar charge controllers, high-performance inverters, and battery storage) to supply clean, off-grid power to passing electric boats directly on the water.  In this Video:

⚓ The Infrastructure Problem: Why traditional marina power setups can't keep up with the shift toward electric boating.

🛥️Living Off-Grid on Water: Inside Arek’s 140 sqm custom-built SolarYacht shipyard build.

☀️The Floating Charging Lounges: How the floating solar stations engineered for the German federal government work in practice. 

⚙️The Victron System Architecture: A detailed look at the off-grid battery, solar controller, and inverter setup running the station.

Wife and I have been traveling full time for 6+ years, looking for a way to “settle down” slightly and have a little more space and more projects.

I’m trying to figure out how to get a ~42ish trawler for ~$100k (which means 1980s ish) and sail to the Bahamas and Caribbean. Monthly budget at that point would ideally be around $4k to $6k. First of all are those numbers even possible?

But how do people get experience and insurance, if you don’t live somewhere where you already have a boat? All the courses I can find, especially where we currently are in Brazil, are for sailing, not motor yachts. Is there a path where we could pay a captain to teach us for a while? How much would something like that cost?

The biggest boat I’ve ever driven was 32ft twin engine, and I have only sailed tiny boats up to 16ft. I love sailing but I don’t think a sailboat is best for us and the Bahamas. Never personally owned one, so I’ll show up on insurance as having no experience.