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Norway Will Make All Short-Haul Flights Electric By 2040 (independent.co.uk)
Norway's public operator of air transport plans to make all short-haul flights in the country entirely electric by 2040. "State-owned Avinor, which operates most of Norway's civil airports, is aiming to be the 'first in the world' to switch to electric air transport," reports The Independent. From the report: "We think that all flights lasting up to 1.5 hours can be flown by aircraft that are entirely electric," chief executive Dag Falk-Petersen told AFP. The announcement confirms Norway's reputation as a leader in electric power. In a 2017 report, Avinor announced that in cooperation with the Norwegian Sports Aviation Association and major airlines, it had set up a development project for electric aircraft. Avinor said it had "called for Norway to be established as a test arena and innovation center for the development of electric aircraft." Avinor intends to reduce aircraft greenhouse gas emissions in the short term by phasing in biofuels in the coming years, and then build on these reductions by phasing in electric planes.
"Flight 666, I know you're at 1% battery, but maintain flight level 3 5 0 while we land more prominent flights."
A timeline to switch over before the first successful prototypes been demonstrated . . .
hawk
So, how long until they add super caps and fly towards storms?
Ideas like this are why we need more people like Norwegians in our country and fewer losers from shithole countries
Are they sure they don't mean "Norway to make all short-haul flights trains by 2040?" And, yes, I am aware of Norway's geography, it just seems like electric passenger flight is... uncertain at best.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
They will be ready in 5 years. They will always be ready in 5 Years.
Lithium polymer battery 0.95 MJ/kg
Jet A 42.80 MJ/kg
Sure. Interesting idea. But it's in reality just an idea. It all depends on technology that doesn't exist yet.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
We've had the capability to do this for quite a while, at least on the military side.
Remember, without massive tax subsidies and tax exemptions, fossil fuels aren't that cost effective.
People are just fearful of change: suppliers, operators, capital loans providers, and so on.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
How many flights per day will these be capable of? a standard hydrocarbon based plane can be disembarked, reloaded with passengers, cargo and fuel in around an hour or so. Seems like these would need HOURS to recharge between flights. possibly capable of a flight or two per day?
Unless batteries are made to be standard cargo container sized modules that can be swapped between planes.
I can only imagine the power demand something like this would require as well. An airport would probably have to have its own onsite hydrocarbon based generation facilities, most airports probably dont have the space for solar for this kind of demand, and you arent going to be putting wind turbines within a mile or more of the airport.
Norway pats itself on the back with it's push for environmental electric driven transportation. But, we need to remember that Norway gets most of it's power from hydroelectric sources, which many countries cannot do and wealth from drilling oil (and ultimately polluting the Earth) from the pristine Arctic Ocean.
That's the wrong ocean. Norway's oil and gas is in North Sea, the Norwegian sea, and recently the Barents sea.
The polluting happens where oil consumption is done. If you don't like it, don't buy it. The world still needs oil at the moment, there's no option to stop supplying other countries.
There's also no reason to complain about Norway's unique nature. There are plenty of other sources of energy such as solar and wind. The point of leading is to go there first, before everyone else, and maybe bringing about technological innovations that can be used by countries that don't have vast amounts of hydroenergy. It's a Good Thing (TM).
Small price to pay in Norway.
It is just like Los Angeles right?
Definition of short-haul: the length of the cable.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
...they might even have a deep enough cycle battery tech by around 2040 or so by then...
Definitely hope this works.
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
This seems a little stupid. Given the design and lead time to developing any aircraft how can they possibly expect to be fully converted in 20 years. They will be lucky to have a small test fleet of planes by then.
The problem isn't even with the batteries. Just try to estimate what kind of electrical infrastructure must be laid to charge those batteries back up to full charge, in 30 minutes max. Kerosine delivers about 10kWh per liter. Take the amount of energy in, say 6000 liters of kerosine (737-800 short-haul trip). that's 60MWh. Try charging that in 30 minutes.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
Why would it need to be recharged in thirty minutes? Why would turnaround time need to be thirty minutes, and why would replaceable battery packs not be an option?
I don't know if this has been mentioned here by someone else, but somethings seems off about this news article. As a Norwegian I couldn't help to wonder where this story originated from, as I have seen nothing about this in norwegian newspapers. Slashdot links to the independent, that refers to an article by NRK on norwaytoday.info. This website does in fact not represent NRK. NRK uses their own NRK.no. The rapport from Avinor predicts that electric aircraft should be available from 2030, not that all Norwegian flight use them from 2040. This seems like a bad job by the journalists in siting sources, or just bad journalism.
Also, you might go with smaller planes. This is domestic Norwegian flights we are talking about; most of them 30-60 minutes with maybe 30 passengers. The government might also give subsidies to have planes grounded to allow for a slightly longer time to refuel.
And tell him to stop paying subsidies to Chinese solar.
Norway doesn't need domestic flights. She is a long and thin country, much like Japan. Similarly, Norway could be ideally served by one or two longitudinal very high-speed railway mainlines with short branches to serves rural destinations. Furthermore, Norway has a huge amount of hydro-electric power installed on their fjord waterfalls, an essentially free source of electrified railway traction. Considering Norway's rather extreme weather and very long artic winter nights, surface transport by rail is also more reliable and less risky than flying.
The problem is, Norway and neighbouring Sweden use an obsolete form of railway electrification, called fractional frequency supply. This scheme forces them to build a parallel national grid and/or install a lot of frequency-changing substations to provide 50/3 = ~16.7 Hz, 15kV AC electricity for the catenary, thereby excessive huge construction / expansion costs. (Note: a similar obsolete system for electric railway traction existed in small parts of the USA until early 1970s with ~ 11kV / 25Hz AC supply.)
To this day, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Austria and Germany haven't adopted the UIC world standard Kando-system, that is railway traction power taken directly from the national electric grid (50Hz AC in Europe) via simple, low-cost 120/25kV ZBD-type transformers. This germanic-nordic weakness is mercilessly exploited by the powerful air travel lobby, which is also supported by the military-industrial complex (namely EADS-Airbus in Europe) because aviation tech is considered useful for warfare, while railways are no longer appreciated by the general staff.
The above is chief reason why Norway is investing in un-nneded and un-tested electric domestic aviation, even though high-tension electric railways have been a daily reality in service since 1902 and high-speed rail has been mature since 1964.
> use liquid H2 feeding into fuel cells. That still counts as "electric".
Sponsored by hydrogen:
Zeppelin von Hindenburg (1937)
Apollo-Saturn mission 13 (1970)
Lets do some calculations. Lets start with a 737 class plane. Empty I found figures of just less than 40 tonnes, the highest MTOW I could find was 70 tonnes. Probably not for the same plane, but lets just take the extremes. That leaves 30 tonnes of fuel or in this case batteries. We're neglecting the fact that we might want to take along some passengers and freight, but this is back-of-the-envelope....
Now I happen to have a few batteries that are not all bad at the energy density. 1.5kg for 800kJ
So our electric plane can take along about 20000 of these batteries for about 16GJ of energy.
Now... in 1.5 hours of flight, for safety you really want for 2 hours worth of fuel. (regulations require more than 45 minutes of extra fuel, but back-of-the-envelope, remember?). In those two hours you'd normally fly about 1600km, but let us round that down to 600km/h, or 1200km. At a glide ratio of 20 (current planes reach about 18, so some improvement is required), that means you need to spend about 1200km/20 * 70 tonnes * G = 42GJ of energy. That's the prop-output energy, so prop-input energy is going to be more on the order of 60GJ. (props are max 70% efficient).
So there is a factor of 4 to 6 to gain in terms of energy density for LIPO batteries before you can fly a commercial plane for 2 hours on batteries. (the "6" there comes from the fact that the difference between MTOW and empty weight is not all batteries).
Such a big improvement of energy density sounds a bit far fetched to me.
To keep weight down by reducing intra-plane wire and bus-bar needs, one could design planes to have very many external charging ports near each subset of batteries. 120MW delivered at 120V over 1000 ports leaves 1000 Amps needed per port for delivering 60MWh in a half hour. That's a lot of welding cable and the connecting robot would have to provide mechanical support, but it is not infeasible to design such a system.
The discussions and technological development about electric cars and airplanes always seems to imply an all-or-none approach to the power source and the drive train. The motive force, torque or thrust, comes from a fuel-energy system that is either all carbon-combustive or else all electrical. Why not a hybrid system?
Assume that the best way to go for the future is an electric drive train. Electric engines provide the mechanical motive force to move the vehicle, and an electrical system (battery or fuel cell) delivers the energy to the engines. But, what if there was an added component to resupply the fuel system - a classic carbon-combustion engine driving an electrical generator. The generator engine would be wholly separate from the drive train (unlike current hybrid electrical cars). It would serve only to generate electricity to restore charge on the batteries (or as needed, feed directly through the power inverter or electrical output stage). In principle, the generator would be a much smaller, lighter, more efficient device than the primary motive engines. It need not run at all except at times of high demand, or for emergency situations such as primary "fuel" running low or unexpected failure in the primary electrical supply system.
Many of the comments in this thread talk about the inadequacies of current electrical technologies to meet FAA requirements for 45 minutes extra flight time, or what next when the batteries are drained? As a back up safety or a range extension subsystem, it seems that a carbon fuel based electrical generator has merit at many levels. Yet, there never seems to be much discussion of such. So, for those more knowledgeable about the subject, what are your thoughts about using a fossil fuel electrical generation system to feed the batteries?
"Why not a hybrid system?"
To sum it up in one word: Weight.
To sum it up in two words: Weight & reliability
Unlike every other form of transport, aircraft designs are incredibly sensitive to weight and using less efficient engines (turbines) makes sense when the engine power is higher (so you need fewer of them = less weight) and the reliability is higher (in the days of pistons it was routine for "long-distance" flights to arrive with one engine out and the engines tended to need heavy maintenance every other flight anyway, making turnarounds extremely slow)
Adding extra mass for a big motor/generator and batteries doesn't make sense, especially when you factor in that aircraft engines spend the vast majority of their operating life either idling (warming up, cooling down and taxiing) or at one fixed power level (plus/minus 10%). Hybrids make more sense when the power requirements are continually varying, so the gains you might make from a hybrid system are outweighed by the extra complexity and mass. The same mass penalties are why it's not considered worthwhile adding electric drive to the wheels, especially given the engines need to be running for some period before applying full power/after landing - the benefits simply aren't worthwhile (and designing for extended ground tows adds weight to the undercarriage with its own sets of panalties)
Electric engines are theoretically better than turbines, but battery energy density needs to improve by at least a factor of 10 before they'd be practical for civil transports.
They are just not allowed to leave the Li batteries connected - to avoid fires.
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.