I'm certain there will soon be dinghy docks with plug and charge stations built right in. That is something you will never see with combustible fuels.
Will, there's a lot of magical thinking in that post of yours, but let's just address this part. First, the second sentence. You'll never see this for combustible fuels because it's entirely unnecessary! You can go to a close, centralized, shared fueling station - the gas dock - and in about 90 seconds pay for 4Mwh worth of portable enregy that weighs about 36 pounds. That's "Mega-Watt hours." Six gallons of gas. And, for the most part, it stays good for quite a while, and if you use your dinghy as I do, lasts for about 6 weeks before refueling. And I refuel in 4 gallon increments, so I have 2 gallons left when I head to the fuel dock.
A representative Torqeedo battery is 915 Wh, new. Let's call it an even kWh. That's 1/4000th of the energy in six gallons of gas.
With a gas station, there's an economy of scale that works. One pump and on attendant can service hundreds of customers per day, and dispense billions of Wh of energy. Billions. The infrastructure is shard, spreadaa out over a large customer base. The economics work.
With your vision, someone would have to invest in those charging stations, maintain them, have a way of charging for the electricity, and
it would have to make commercial sense, or no one is going to do it. And so, unless it's heavily subsidized by the government, it's not going to happen.
Electric vehicles, because of the time required to charge them, and the energy density of the batteries, do not work at scale. Most proponents are simply not aware of the science of queuing theory, or willfully ignore it. In it's simplest form, consider queue time and service time. How long does it take to charge? How long will you have to wait to charge, given the demand, and the number of charging stations at the end of the queue? With their much lower energy storage capacity, and much longer recharge time compared to gas, lines would grow exponentially - clogging the roads - unless the number of charging stations grows exponentially, or the charging time shrinks dramatically. Of the entire motoring population, only a very small fraction have the luxury of a private garage and charging station. There are many more cars parked on the street in the Bronx than there are private garages in all of NYC.
For outboards - it's impossible to beat the economy, utility and flexibility of gas, or the ubiquity of useable refueling facilities, in my opinion And I don't think that will change in the next century, or longer.
If you're still running one today, more power to you (nobody wants to take it away from you). Ours hit the landfill in the 70's (or earlier).
