From April 14 to 16, manned and unmanned boats designed by students across the U.S. raced down the Elizabeth River at the 2026 Promoting Electric Propulsion (PEP) Competition. Amongst the competitors was GW Engineering’s newest student-led technical design team, Electric Yacht at GW, which put their boat and its captain, Kaya Alper-Nocera, a junior mechanical engineering major, to the test on the second day of competition.
With electric propulsion, boats no longer rely on conventional internal combustion engines that burn fuel, making them more sustainable and removing the risk of oil spills. The American Society of Naval Engineers began the PEP competition six years ago to showcase the benefits of electric boats and to give college students experience with this emerging technology, preparing them for careers in naval engineering.
Alongside fellow junior Adam Newman, Alper-Nocera proposed competing in 2024 as a way to give students hands-on experience in naval engineering through a collaborative design team format. Despite administrative obstacles, they integrated the team as a technical arm of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers chapter at GW in Fall 2025 and began securing sponsorships to fund their project. For instance, their boat’s steering system is sponsored by Akerstrom Tool Co.
“Our main principle with this whole project is getting people involved and getting them passionate about it,” Alper-Nocera stated.
While both mechanical engineering majors, Newman and Alper-Nocera have distinct interests and backgrounds. The PEP Competition combines their expertise, as Newman’s knowledge of energy engineering was useful in designing the electric propulsion systems that propel the boat. Alper-Nocera’s sailing experience as a licensed captain and previous role as a lead researcher at Yale University, where he helped build the world’s first solar-electric pump-out vessel, provided the needed in-depth knowledge of boats and enabled him to pilot this vessel.
With support from Erica Cusi Wortham, director of GW’s Innovation Center and co-curricular engagement and interdisciplinary programs, they secured a place in Tompkins Hall to work on the boat they acquired only in November. This gave them only a third of the preparation time compared to other schools, making it a race to the finish line for the GW Engineering team.
Their boat, named US-0 as an allusion to a zero-emissions version of the US-1 number given to the season-winning powerboat in offshore racing classes, is a standard 14’, single-seater APBA Class D hydroplane–meaning it rides on top of the water rather than displacing it. After a strenuous journey bringing it from Long Island to Washington, D.C., they quickly laid the groundwork by creating the conceptual designs before leaving for winter break.
When the new semester began, the team focused on finalizing the 3D designs using computer-aided design software and began building the systems as parts arrived in February and March. Throughout this process, their faculty advisor, Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Azar Panah, offered valuable technical design tips that guided their progress.
The team got creative with limited resources, repurposing car parts to fabricate the powertrain system and building other key components themselves. They fabricated the outboard motor at GW’s Machine Shop using primarily aluminum, except for high-stress parts such as the steering shaft, which was made of stainless steel, with help from the Lab Manager, Bill Rutowski. Via a belt-driven pulley system, the motor transmits power to the propeller shaft, which was repurposed from a Yamaha 40-horsepower (hp) outboard.
At general body meetings held twice a week, the approximately 30 team members focused on the boat's defined technical subsystems. This structure ensured that each student took ownership of a project element, directly reflecting Alper-Nocera and Newman’s ethos of empowering every student to serve as a group leader.
“I think two things can be true: we’ve worked very hard on this administratively since 2024, and we are very proud of the team and community and where it’s at,” said Newman. “At the same time, people can still show up and can contribute as our equals.”
“We want to be able to help give students the skills they need to succeed throughout their college experience and beyond, and also instill that interest in boats that I have,” Alper-Nocera said.
In the weeks leading up to the competition, they all collaborated to wire power delivery and controls to the electric motor, sand and epoxy the boat, begin computer simulations of a 3D hull scan, and fabricate the custom outboard motor. The grind didn’t stop there, though–Newman, Alper-Nocera, and five teammates picked up additional components on their way to Portsmouth, and once they arrived, they worked to solve last-minute problems that required them to rebuild their outboard motor to prepare their boat for the qualification round.
Once on the water, the boat uses a Curtis F6-A controller, which serves as the “brain” of the motor. When Alper-Nocera pushes the throttle, the controller reads the required power and sends the appropriate amount of electricity to the motor. It gets energy from two large batteries, which are connected in parallel to provide steady power. With a hull weight of about 140 pounds and a motor outputting 25hp, he reached up to 50 knots in the water–equal to about 58 miles per hour.
Alper-Nocera piloted the vessel using a steering bar mounted above the outboard, which runs back to the cockpit and wraps around a spool. Using a tiny computer called a Raspberry Pi Pico, both he and the team could monitor the boat's systems, as it fed telemetry data, such as acceleration, position, speed, and battery life, to a dashboard in the cockpit and streamed it back to the team on land.
Despite the competition marking their first on-water test, GW Engineering’s boat qualified for the manned event and hit the water again the next day as the only first-year team in that race. The camaraderie was evident among competitors, as fellow teams helped Electric Yacht at GW carry their boat to the launch area because they had no trailer, and students from Princeton University and the University of Michigan shared insights for future competitions.
Newman and Alper-Nocera shared that they are very proud of qualifying in their first year of competing and of how the team collaborated to build everyone’s first boat in just three and a half months.
“This is the prototype of all prototypes. This was our best effort, given there was no time for testing and no time for the iterative process that engineers follow,” said Newman.
Participating in the PEP competition was a culmination of a months-long sprint from digital model to high-speed reality for the Electric Yacht at GW team. By refusing to let administrative hurdles or a compressed timeline stall their vision, Alper-Nocera, Newman, and the whole team demonstrated that the most important component of any project isn’t a part you can order online–it’s taking the initiative to follow your passions.
Explore a collection of photos from the Electric Yacht at GW team’s experience preparing for the 2026 PEP competition below, and stay tuned for what comes next as they work to enhance the team’s structure and improve their boat’s electric propulsion systems for 2027.
