TECH & AI
CREDIT: XAVIER GARCIA / BLOOMBERG
Blue tarps cover homes damaged by Hurricane
Maria San Juan, Puerto Rico
To be clear, a Kraaken stationed offshore would not have prevented that damage. It could, however, supply electricity and clean water to the communities while repairs were carried out on land, Optimal Transit suggests.
The company says the vessel’ s power output could cover around 32,000 homes, while its water production could support roughly 150,000 people a day.
A fleet of Kraakens, therefore, could have made a real difference to the relief efforts around the island. But with such futuristic specifications, how much might a Kraaken actually cost? The answer, according to Optimal Transit, is not as much as one might think.
The economic viability of building a Kraaken Optimal Transit puts the cost of building a single Kraaken vessel at around US $ 587m. That, in short, is a huge amount of money.
However, the companies estimate that replicating the same power, water and compute capacity using land-based infrastructure could actually cost far more – anywhere between US $ 750m and US $ 1.33bn, they say.
Optimal Transit is also pitching the platform at scale. Five Kraaken vessels grouped together, in what the company terms a Sovereign Power Park, could actually provide around 200MW of baseload electricity to local grids. That grouping would also produce 40 million gallons of fresh water daily alongside 300MW of data centre capacity. For coastal regions prone to grid failure, the companies suggest this could be a model of energy resilience that does not depend on the state of the local network at all.
Of course, the project is still in its very earliest stages and any next steps will depend entirely on securing funding from investors and governments. That said, it is impossible to ignore the sheer utopian ambition of the Kraaken project, and it is a proposition that venture capital firms will be watching closely.
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