The solar party pontoon and the boats that tried it for real

What it was

Christopher Williams posted his Pontoon boat project to the portfolio site Coroflot in February 2010. A month later it reached the design blogs, ours included, as a party boat that was meant to feel luxurious without a luxury price. The mission statement on his later Behance page is shorter: design an energy efficient pontoon boat.

The proposal combined an existing material with one new idea. The hull was to use Roplene, the rotomolded polyethylene construction of the boat builder Triumph, which forms a hull as one seamless piece. On top sat solar panels on a roof that moved up and down to follow the sun, with a folding fabric shade for the deck. Williams’s sketches add a waterslide off the stern, a shower, a toy bin and a water trampoline.

A roof that follows the sun is easy to draw, and a price a family will pay is not.

Where the idea went

Nowhere, as a product. In October 2014 Pontoon & Deck Boat magazine ran the design as a pontoon boat of the future and promised to report if it ever reached production. We could not find such a report.

Other people did build solar pontoons. Tamarack Lake Electric Boat Co., founded in Ontario in 2005, was selling its eight-passenger Loon by 2006. The Globe and Mail put the price at about $35,000, roughly double a comparable gas boat. In 2009 designers who had worked on the Aptera car redrew the Loon as a 22-foot boat with a collapsible 1,000-watt solar roof. Tamarack moved to Rome, New York, and began assembly there in 2012. The US Coast Guard lists the company as out of business since July 2019.

Bigger money did not make it easier. Pure Watercraft, 25 percent owned by General Motors, unveiled a ten-seat electric pontoon in April 2023 with a starting price of $75,000. The company entered receivership in July 2024.

What it means now

Williams’s instinct about the roof was sound. A pontoon boat has a large flat canopy and is built for slow cruising, which is the easy case for solar power. Tamarack’s founder said the panels did two jobs: they added range, and they made the battery perform better.

The hard part was never the drawing. It was the price. The Loon cost about twice as much as a gas pontoon in 2006, and Pure’s boat started at $75,000 in 2023. What an owner can do today is more modest: lay a flexible panel on the canopy to keep the batteries topped up, or fit a quiet electric trolling motor for slow runs.