Royal Caribbean’s Oasis of the Seas Installs PV Panels

When passengers on the Oasis of the Seas cruise the sunny Caribbean, some of the power on the ship is coming from solar energy.

High on deck 19, out of sight from passengers, are 21,000 square feet of thin solar film that produce enough power to light the ship’s Royal Promenade and Central Park areas.

The Miami-based cruise company learned some lessons from installations on two of its Celebrity Solstice class ships before installing the system on Oasis, which is the world’s largest cruise ship at 5,408 passengers and 225,282 tons.

The $750,000 installation was a coup for BAM Solar Power, which expects to triple sales to $15 million this year. BAM Solar Power is benefiting from being certified distributors for BP Solar and GE Energy, which provided the lead on the Royal Caribbean work.

Royal Caribbean, which is the world’s second-largest cruise company, doesn’t expect a rapid payoff on its solar panel investments, but they fit well with its overall effort to make energy-efficient cruise ships and care for the environment. The company’s annual sustainability report says eight of its ships have smokeless gas-turbine engines – the first in the cruise industry – which can reduce the exhaust emissions of nitrous oxide by 85 percent and sulfur oxides by more than 90 percent.

Other Royal Caribbean efforts to include more energy-efficient lighting and air-conditioning systems that can turn off automatically when balcony doors are left open too long.

As far as we know Royal Caribbean is the only cruise company doing solar installations on its ships. It’s said the world’s largest cruise company isn’t doing so because the return on investment is not yet high enough.

Raskin said another reason Royal Caribbean is installing solar panels is what sustainability architects call “future proofing.” In other words, utilizing imperfect existing technology will pave the way for easy adoption of more efficient solar panels in the future. Old panels can be ripped off and new ones installed.

His hope is that solar panels’ progression follows Moore’s Law, which reflected the rapid growth in the capabilities of computer chips. Oasis are basically like peel-and-stick tiles, although Raskin’s crew found that the freezing weather in Turku, Finland, where the ship was built, was a bit too cold for that to work.

BAM, which has its main office in Jacksonville, beat out global competition to get the job, and it is expected to see a similar installation on the Allure of the Seas, the sister ship to the Oasis that’s currently under construction.