Having grown up next to a Danish first oil then coal powerplant, I can testify that some of the plants are actually dismantled while other have been converted to running on gas. One side effect of this was that many workers lost their jobs as a modern gas driven plant can be run by way fewer people.

I believe the housewives of the town are happy though. When I was a kid they were always complaining that their laundry hanging outside for drying was getting dirty by the smoke from the powerplant and the dust from the trucks driving the slag away.

The expression 'world fastest kayak' is somewhat like 'world fastest running shoes'. Race kayaking is all about the motor and to a much lesser degree about the kayak.

It makes much more sense to speak about the water resistance of various kayak designs. For some given athlete(balance skills, strength and technique) racing some given distance in some given conditions one could even speak of an optimal design. As a general example - the kayaks used for sprint racing are different from the kayaks used for marathon racing.

On a related note genetic algorithms have been applied to the problem of finding an optimal hull given a number of constraints: http://www.cyberiad.net/library/kayaks/racing/raci ng.htm
Nothing revolutionary turned out though.

/Peter