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Norway Tests Tiny Electric Plane, Sees Passenger Flights by 2025 (reuters.com)
Norway tested a two-seater electric plane on Monday and predicted a start to passenger flights by 2025 if new aviation technologies match a green shift that has made Norwegians the world's top buyers of electric cars. From a report: Transport Minister Ketil Solvik-Olsen and Dag Falk-Petersen, head of state-run Avinor which runs most of Norway's airports, took a few minutes' flight around Oslo airport in an Alpha Electro G2 plane, built by Pipistrel in Slovenia. "This is ... a first example that we are moving fast forward" toward greener aviation, Solvik-Olsen told Reuters. "We do have to make sure it is safe - people won't fly if they don't trust it." He said plane makers such as Boeing and Airbus were developing electric aircraft and that battery prices were tumbling, making it feasible to reach a government goal of making all domestic flights in Norway electric by 2040.
> In Norway, electricity is way cheaper than jet fuel. Because of this, if electric planes become relevant, Norway could insert itself as a major air traffic hub for other European travel.
First of all, have you looked at how much of a detour that'd be for most of Europe? Also I think you can flip that one around. We have a lot of hydro power because of very challenging geography with tall mountains, deep fjords, narrow valleys that produce floods in spring, tons of snow and avalanches in winter, landslides in autumn and in summer it's construction work everywhere to fix the damage. So Norwegians often go by plane on relatively short hops where most other countries would have trains, which would be superior anywhere it's reasonably flat. And we're willing to massively subsidize EVs over ICEs, we're more like the perfect trial balloon/research project. Like if electric planes can't be made to work here, even with all the crutches we'll give them they won't work anywhere.
And it's highly unlikely this will lead to some sort of quick revolution, we've invested tons of money in electric cars since the 1990s that went bankrupt four times because the technology was not mature enough, they get tax breaks, free toll roads, free parking, free HOV lanes etc. and with all that we're up to 25% EVs, 30% hybrids and it's still ongoing. If we cut the subsidies sales would flop back to the noise floor. Like maybe Norway can make electric planes kinda work with generous subsidies but the rest of the world won't care. And as the oil dries up and demographics change towards 2050 I think we'll lose the taste for hideously expensive eco-boondoggles too. But so far we have the money for this...
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Norway is a long and narrow country, so travel distances are actually extremely long. Counting just the larger airports in Norway (i.e. those that transport more than a million passengers per year), the air distance from Kristiansand to Tromsø is 860 miles, which is about the distance from New York to Florida. If you count smaller airports (but still with more than a hundred thousand passengers per year), the distance from Kristiansand to Kirkenes is about 1030 miles. If you don't only count mainland Norway, but also include Svalbard, then the distance from Longyearbyen to Kristiansand is 1400 miles, which is about the distance from New York to Texas.