WATCH: Superyacht Dwarfs Small Dutch Town

Check out this aerial drone video of a brand new 83.5-meter (nearly 274 feet!) superyacht in the canal’s of the small town of Alphen aan den Rijn, in the Netherlands.

The yacht, named Savannah, was transported Thursday from Feadship’s Royal De Vries Aalsmeer shipyard to Rotterdam. The superyacht is the first to feature a hybrid diesel-electric propulsion system, making it one of the most environmentally-friendly superyachts in the world.

According to a Feadship statement announcing Savannah’s launch in January:

Savannah has a dynamic hull shape with a very fine entry, uses one efficient medium-speedWärtsilä main engine instead of two higher-rev diesel motors, a single central propeller shaft installation on the centreline and three gensets.

Redundancy is ensured by fitting a large contra-rotating and azimuthing sternthruster just aft of the main propeller. The design of the aft ship allows for a propeller that is forty per cent larger than the norm. Combined with the power supplied by the thruster, the load on the propeller is only half that of a conventional twin screw yacht. This again results in a higher efficiency and fewer vibrations. In addition, the large sternthruster also ensures excellent maneuverability in marinas.

“It is not the individual technologies used on Savannah that are new in the yachting world – it is the way they have been combined,” said the owner’s project manager, Ted McCumber. “Feadship has leveraged on all the options available in the marine industry today to bring this hugely innovative system to completion.

“The possibility to choose between diesel, diesel-electric or fully electric is truly exceptional. Moreover, Savannah is the first yacht in the world to be running with an azipull and a variable pitch propeller. Only Feadship engineering and the rich experience of this yard could have successfully concluded a project of such scope and vision,” McCumber added.

Here’s the yacht passing one of many bridges on the trip:

“As the first ever hybrid superyacht, she offers incredible flexibility in operations and loading of the power plant,” says Feadship director Henk de Vries. “The result is fuel savings of some thirty percent compared to the best boats that we have launched to date.

“The way in which one gigantic propeller has been installed in front with another electrically powered prop in its slipstream has also never been applied on a yacht. A similar system has been used on board passenger ships in Japan, but that is an ‘industrial’ solution, without the attention to comfort required on a Feadship. To achieve this on a superyacht entailed an exceptional degree of cooperation with Wärtsilä and all the other equipment manufacturers.”

According to Feadship, more than a 1,000 people have been involved with the creation of Savannah since the contract was signed at the end of 2011.

The yacht will be available for charter in summer 2015 through Feadship Charter. Just think, all this could be yours… for a mere 1.4 million euros per week.

Some incredible photos of Savannah’s transit can be found on Facebook.