Vendée Globe teams ‘stealing’ technologies originally developed for other applications: Onboard Oliver Heer’s IMOCA

When Vendée Globe organisers announced in November 2025 that skippers competing in the 2028 edition would need to aim for energy self-sufficiency based on carbon-free energy, the goal was set –  to limit the use of fossil fuels as much as possible.

Under the new rules, fuel allowances will be reduced from 300 litres to just 60 litres, forcing teams to rethink how power is generated and managed onboard. While fossil fuel has traditionally been used to power electronics, heating and communications systems, future campaigns will need to rely much more heavily on renewable energy sources.

“It’s changing the philosophy of how we manage power on board,” says Lincoln Dews, performance analyst and co-skipper for Oliver Heer Ocean Racing, as he points out the addition of solar panels.

For IMOCA teams, it means greater dependence on solar power and hydrogeneration, while development priorities increasingly focus on battery technology, power budgeting and overall energy efficiency. The result is a highly demanding real-world testbed for low-carbon marine power systems, with technologies developed for offshore racing likely to find applications across the wider marine sector.

A proven platform under constant development

Heer’s IMOCA has already completed two Vendée Globe campaigns under different skippers since being launched in 2018. The last iteration was with Justine Mettraux. She purchased it from Jeremy Bayou, it’s original skipper for whom the boat was built.

The yacht has undergone successive rounds of preparation and development and is now being readied for a fully crewed sailing programme as part of its ongoing training and performance cycle (including the Ocean Race 2027) ahead of Oliver Heer’s next Vendée Globe campaign in 2028. (Heer previously worked with Alex Thomson).

As with many IMOCA projects, development is driven by a constant balancing act between performance gains and structural reliability.

Batteries and fibre optics move centre stage

Among the technologies under discussion by Heer’s team are solid-state lithium batteries.

“That’s something we’re investing a lot of time in,” says Dews. “We haven’t committed that way yet, but we expect to by the time the boat goes sailing again.”

He says the attraction lies not only in the ability to run lithium batteries harder, but also in achieving a more stable chemical composition.

Monitoring strain through carbon structure

Alongside battery development, the team is investing heavily in fibre-optic structural monitoring systems.

“We’ve stolen that straight out of the aerospace world, and also the wind farm world,” says Dews.

The technology allows engineers to monitor loads and strain throughout the yacht’s carbon structure. However, offshore racing presents a unique challenge because the loads experienced by IMOCAs often exceed those found in the industries from which the technology originated, says Dews.

“What’s interesting about the fibre optic stuff is that a lot of other industries have a bigger safety tolerance factor than we do,” he also notes.

“We’re sailing around and putting load through carbon fibre structure a lot more than the wind farm, the aerospace, even the America’s Cup boats do. And cycle loading things a lot harder.”

The crossover potential extends well beyond racing, with applications emerging in superyachts, commercial vessels, composite workboats and wind-assisted shipping projects. Dews notes that companies involved in sailing-powered shipping are already beginning to adopt similar fibre-optic monitoring systems within their own structures.

Weather-routing technologies developed for offshore racing are also increasingly finding applications in commercial shipping operations.

Foiling pushes rigs beyond their original design assumptions

One of the most significant engineering challenges facing the class centres on rig design.

The standardised rigs used across the fleet were originally engineered for non-foiling IMOCAs. The arrival of increasingly powerful foils has pushed those structures much closer to their design limits.

“These boats, with the foils, now race way closer to the above the safety tolerance they were designed for,” says Dews.

As a result, teams carry out extensive monitoring of compression loads, accumulated loads and structural alignment throughout the rig. Modelling these loads remains difficult because simulation tools struggle to accurately reproduce the slamming forces and complex wave impacts experienced offshore.

For now, the class continues to reinforce existing rigs rather than redesign them entirely.

“Eventually we’ll get to the stage where we’ll need to build new rigs, but they [class association] are trying to keep the costs down for everyone in the class,” says Leah Sweet, boat captain. “They’re doing the best they can to reinforce the parts of the rig.”

Safety systems become increasingly autonomous

Safety technology is another area where developments could have implications for the wider marine industry.

According to Dews, teams are exploring systems that integrate autopilot controls, cameras, AIS data and radar inputs into a single decision-making platform.

Some concepts under development could automatically deploy safety equipment if a skipper falls overboard, while future systems may be capable of responding to collision risks identified by onboard sensors.

“There’s active ways to now incorporate all of those safety factors into one decision-making tool,” says Dews.

Such systems could eventually provide automatic responses while also overriding autopilot functions when necessary.

“There’s a lot of interesting stuff in that space at the moment.”

Connectivity with limits

Despite the sophisticated technology onboard, strict racing regulations continue to limit what teams can do with data once a race begins.

During training, engineers can analyse large volumes of information and continuously refine performance models. During the Vendée Globe itself, however, communication rules are much tighter (performance teams cannot provide tactical advice during the race) – and any permitted communication is public.

Many teams are therefore cautious about transmitting data from their boats – and giving away their secrets.

“Most of the Vendée boats beam off very limited stuff.”

Engineering partnerships drive innovation

A significant proportion of Heer’s team’s development work relies on expertise drawn from outside the marine sector.

One example is Bossard, a specialist engineering company.

“We’ve got a partnership with Bossard,” says Dews. “They specialise in fasteners and load sensing. They approach a lot of our problems with an aerospace kind of engineering.”

Those cross-sector partnerships are becoming increasingly important as IMOCA campaigns adopt technologies originally developed for aerospace, wind energy and advanced manufacturing applications.