Hello Ocean Friends,

This week I’m featuring a conversation I had with Flux Marine’s Ben Sorkin. Ben gave me my new favorite obsession, marina electrification micro-grids. Always a pleasure to hang out with Flux’s Co-founder, I hope you enjoy the interview as well. If you’re lucky, you could get a ride on one of Flux’s electric boats at the NYC OceanTech Summit.

Best,
Will

People-to-know: Ben Sorkin, CEO & Co-founder Flux Marine

Will: Ben, thanks for taking the time to chat with me. Let’s start here: who are you and what do you do?

Ben: It’s great to be on here, Will. I'm someone who grew up boating my whole life, fixing old boats, restoring old boats, and dealing with the dichotomy that boats are not great for the environment. Beyond that, people joke that “boat” stands for Bust Out Another Thousand. Things are always breaking. Things are always going wrong.

I always wanted to do something that would help bring the marine industry toward a sustainable energy future while, at the same time, bringing a better experience, one where you're not dealing with maintenance so painfully. That was really the thesis and driving force behind what is today Flux Marine.

Back in 2015, when I was in college working on all sorts of fun, crazy electrification projects, I started to think about how we bring electrification technology to the marine industry—and how we make as big of an impact as possible.

If you look at the marine industry, there are about 3,000 companies that build boats, but only a handful that build propulsion systems: outboards, inboards, and stern drives. The majority, about 90%, of new boats are sold with outboard motors. When thinking about this, how do you have the most scalable effect? Clearly, it’s through the electrification of outboards. You can enable thousands of boat companies and millions of boats to go electric.

The next question became: what's our technology stack? There are a few ways to go about it. We wanted something that was scalable to higher horsepower. We didn't want just traditional trolling motors. We wanted to be able to go water skiing, have fun, and go out in rough weather.

We saw a couple of companies taking the approach of repurposing gas outboard engines, removing the internals and putting electric powertrains in, which, frankly, works. You can get to market pretty quickly, but it’s not elegant. You don’t own your supply chain. It’s not particularly efficient, and it carries a lot of the vestigial issues of traditional gas engines.

In 2015, we set out with a completely blank-slate approach to building a maintenance-free, reliable, powerful, scalable electric outboard motor.

Fast forward to 2020, that’s when my two cofounders, Daylin and John, and I went full-time, raised outside capital, and moved from bootstrap mode to seed mode. We took those years of research, put more capital behind it, and started bringing prototypes to market.

There are a lot of great companies doing good work, but we’ve had dozens of systems and thousands of hours out in the field with customers. We had a select group of pre-order customers that we delivered systems to and said: “Use them for two years, beat the hell out of them, and give us as much feedback as possible.”

The marine industry is incredibly unforgiving compared to any other environment. We knew that we would absolutely learn and we certainly did. Millions of data points allowed us to inform our production design, which is now going out to customers.

Will: Have you found that customers are making conservation-based buying decisions? If not, what is the pain point that you're really addressing?

Ben: It's multifaceted. There are certainly customers who, from a sustainability perspective, don't want to use gas boats. Even then, it’s not just about CO2. Boats still don’t have catalytic converters, which were required in cars over fifty years ago. The particulate pollution from the 8 to 9 million recreational gas boats produces more non-CO2 particulate emissions than all the registered cars in the U.S. It’s a shocking statistic.

For other customers, it’s the experience, specifically the sound and fumes. If you’ve ever had to spend a lot of time motoring slowly with an outboard, inhaling fumes is not great. On the back of every boat you buy today, there’s a carbon monoxide poisoning warning sticker. Sadly, every year a few people get carbon monoxide poisoning.

Not producing the fumes and smell is something people absolutely love.

Additionally, if you've been on a lake and had to fill up your boat on a busy weekend, it isn’t fun. You can spend hours in line, with people spilling gas everywhere. Plus, it is extremely expensive. Not having to fill up has probably been one of the most popular benefits.

Personally, I use one of our boats to commute from Bristol to East Greenwich, RI. It's a little over 10 nautical miles each way. It sure beats traffic. The simplicity of not having to go to a fuel dock, or even know when the fuel dock is open, is incredible. Just plug in, it's like a third cleat.

Maintenance is another one. We designed the hell out of these things, put them through their paces. We've tested these for over a thousand hours at wide open throttle-zero maintenance all on our proprietary driveline.

To not have to deal with maintenance or winterization is just another pain point. For a gas-powered boat, you need to put it away each winter. And before you bring it out again, you need to de-winterize it, which we don’t have to do at all.

It’s all these different reasons that just add up.

Will: Reading tea leaves: in 5, 10, or 15 years from now, what is Flux doing? What are you doing?

Ben: You mean including you and me sitting in our luxury recreational boat sipping martinis in the Caribbean?

Will: Well, beyond the obvious.

Ben: For us, it’s staying at the forefront of marine technology and enabling electrification in as many different segments and geographical locations as possible.

One of the unique things we’ve done is build our own vertical technology stack. We build our own battery packs, we have our own battery management system, our own power electronics, electric motors, and cooling systems.

That really opens the door for us to be able to scale up or down to higher or lower horsepower. While one hundred horsepower is our flagship, we've tested much lower and much higher than that. So, we’ll build bespoke models for specific market needs.

Then there’s enabling electrification of other industries. We've already put our battery management system and electric motors in non-marine applications. So expect us to continue developing technology that enables electrification of other platforms.

Will: That leads well into my next question: for the Blue Economy, where are we going? What’s next for us broadly?

Ben: I think the key word here is decarbonization. The harnessing and transferring of energy is really the future of the Blue Economy. Decarbonization in all maritime sectors: recreational, charter, and commercial work boats. Flux Marine has boats in every one of those categories.

We’ve powered a handful of commercial work boats that are running all day long up in Maine. We’d like to see every aquaculture skiff go electric. Charter boats, rental fleets, yacht tenders, I’d like to see this proliferate from a decarbonization perspective.

The Blue Economy, from that perspective, is really about the movement and storage of energy. So, thinking about this: if I have, say, 50 electric boats at a marina operating intelligently in tandem, that’s a hell of a microgrid. And those boats aren’t being used 24/7. Now we can store a lot of power adjacent to population centers.

Then we start to think about where we are generating power. How are we harnessing power from the ocean, one of the most energy-dense systems on our planet? From my perspective, it’s the promise of distributed energy capture, storage, and usage that I think is going to be the defining factor of the Blue Economy. That's really cool.

Will: This has been a blast, but it’s time for me to wrap up. What's your ask for the people reading this interview? Who are the people you want to talk to, and why should they talk to you?

Ben: The most important thing for us at the moment is awareness that marine electrification is no longer just about trolling motors. There are things available for consumers to use and buy right now. Things are proven. Things are working. People need to experience what we’re making.

So the ask is: schedule a sea trial and come out on a Flux-powered electric boat.

Whether you're looking for a lake boat, a pontoon, a speed boat—it is now time to experience one of these boats and learn what the future of mobility on the water looks like.

You can schedule a sea trial right on the website. Or reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'm always happy to chat.

Editor’s Note: Ben is bringing one of his awesome electric boats to the NYC OceanTech Summit in a month. Make sure you sign up today for a chance to go for a seatrial.

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