Vitters' Zero drops the engine room for a 5MWh battery
A 68.9-metre yacht built with no engine room
Vitters launched Zero at Harlingen in the Netherlands this month, closing seven years of work that began in 2019 with design studio Vripack and Dykstra Naval Architects, and hull refinement from Emirates Team New Zealand. The 68.9-metre aluminium ketch carries no combustion engine, no fuel tanks and no engine room. Vripack co-creative director Marnix Hoekstra has said those components were never in the plan, so they simply are not aboard.
Power comes from three renewable sources feeding a battery bank of about 5,000kWh (5MWh). Hydro-generating propellers reclaim up to 250kW while the yacht is sailing, 100 square metres of hybrid photovoltaic-thermal panels sit across the deck and superstructure, and the rig captures wind. A 700-volt direct-current grid ties it together. The design also cuts the hotel load, the power a yacht burns simply existing, to under 30kW from a more typical 90kW.
The target is fourteen days off the grid
The stated aim is two weeks entirely off shore power, generating and storing everything the yacht needs. The team frames it more starkly still: sail roughly two hours a day, they argue, and Zero could in theory stay grid-free year round. Lloyd's Register has certified the sails as her primary means of propulsion rather than an auxiliary to an engine that is not there.
The honest part is the caveat. Alongside at a marina or yard, Zero still draws shore power, which is only as clean as the local grid. That admission matters, because it points at where the real gain sits. The headline is the missing engine room, but the engineering that makes fourteen days plausible is the brutal cut to hotel load, the demand side rather than the supply side.
The open-source pack may outlast the boat
Vitters and its partners have handed the technical work to Foundation Zero, a non-profit publishing the project's research, software code and system schematics at foundationzero.org. The foundation holds no stake in the yacht and did not build her. Dykstra partner Mark Leslie-Miller described the moment of launch this way: 'Seeing her afloat transforms all of that into a living experiment.'
For an owner weighing a green build, that pack is the useful output. A bespoke one-off usually locks its lessons inside one hull and one yard. Here the reference point is public: a 68.9-metre proving what renewable propulsion and a disciplined hotel load can do together. The caveat for buyers is scope. Zero is a sailing yacht designed around her rig, not a template a displacement motoryacht can copy wholesale.