The product
Marine Solar Trees
An off-grid energy ecosystem for the waterfront, grown from the urban solar tree and rebuilt for salt, sun and superyachts.
Principle
Functional beauty, engineered to be boring in the best way.
The brief was uncomfortable on purpose: produce serious power at the quayside, without a technical compound, without cabling works, and without anything a marina director would be reluctant to put in the brochure.
What resulted is a structure people walk under without thinking about it. High-efficiency photovoltaic panels are shaped and angled to catch light through the whole arc of the day, held in a canopy that also does the ordinary work of shelter.
Underneath, the tree behaves like infrastructure: metered, monitored, connected to the marina’s systems, and dull in its reliability.
Four things it does at once
01
Height, not footprint
Pontoons and hard standing are the most contested surfaces in any harbour. The tree claims a trunk's worth of deck and gives back a canopy of shade.
02
Generation and storage in one
Batteries sit inside the structure. Power collected at noon runs the promenade at midnight, without a plant room or a second building.
03
Non-invasive by construction
Modular anchoring means no trenching, no dredging and no permanent scar. A tree can be added, moved or removed as the marina changes.
04
Surplus back to shore
What the harbour cannot use can be pushed to the local grid, turning a marina from an energy consumer into a neighbourhood asset.
Certification
Evidence, not intention.
Environmental accreditation schemes ask marinas to show what they have actually done. An orchard of solar trees is unusually easy to evidence: the generation is metered, the reduction is calculable, and the installation is visible from every berth.
That makes the trees a practical instrument for operators pursuing Blue Flag, Clean Marina or ISO 14001, and a straightforward answer when charter clients ask what the harbour is doing.
Marine Solar Trees
What a marina asks before it plants one
- What is a Marine Solar Tree?
A sculptural photovoltaic canopy for marinas and waterfronts. It carries type-approved triple-laminate glass panels on a marine-grade structure, holds its own storage and lighting inside the trunk, and feeds berth supply, promenade lighting, charging points and service hubs. A single tree peaks at 3.2 kW.
- How much power does an orchard produce?
Twelve trees make an orchard of 38.7 kWp, generating 74.8 MWh per year under United Arab Emirates irradiance. That is enough to run 154 LED promenade lights at 40 W for twelve hours every night, or to charge three electric marina RIBs 936 times a year.
- Does installing them disrupt the marina?
No. The trees build upward rather than outward, so nothing is trenched, nothing is dredged and no quayside is claimed. Berths stay in use, and the canopy adds shade and seating where there was only paving.
- Will they survive a marine environment?
They are specified for it. Stainless steel and marine aluminium throughout, chosen against salt, humidity and sustained heat rather than inland conditions, with type-approved glass in the canopy.
- Has this been built before?
Yes, on land. An orchard of Urban Solar Trees stands over a car park and has been generating, lighting and shading there since before the marine version existed. The Marine Solar Tree takes that proven structure and specifies it for salt water.
- What happens at night or during an outage?
Batteries sit inside the structure, sized to carry night-time loads such as lighting, security and service points. The marina keeps running when the grid does not.
The marina as its own energy ecosystem: trees powering boats, lighting and amenities, on site.
Discuss your harbour