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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.
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.
Battery prices aren't the big problem. Battery weight is the problem when it comes to aviation. Even the best battery tech we have today has a rather poor power to weight ratio. I see no evidence in this article that they have solved that problem since that would require a breakthrough in power density for batteries.
Note that the plane they show has a takeoff weight of 570kg which allows for basically no cargo or passengers. For comparison the EMPTY weight of a Cessna 170 is an almost identical 573kg and it has a takeoff weight of 864-1000kg.
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Battery weight is the problem when it comes to aviation.
Simple. Keep the batteries on the ground and run a cable up to the plane.
Battery weight is the problem when it comes to aviation.
So? That means (for the time being) it'll only work for very light planes, and/or short hops. Trips like Amsterdam -> London, which iirc is something like 15 or 20 mins actual flight time. Plenty of short flight routes like that around the world. And of course that's only the beginning as battery technology improves.
That said: personally I think it's a shame we're not seeing more electric ships. For that application, weight is a non-issue. And moving masses through water is a very energy-efficient manner to move anything around, so energy contents is also less of an issue than for cars or planes. Well at least we have electric bicycles... :-)
LI-Ion/LI Polymer batteries don't have quite the power/weight of conventional fuel, but it's perfectly acceptable for low-performance airplanes even now.
Not if you plan to carry any cargo they are not. And since cargo cost per unit distance traveled is by far the most important metric for their success we aren't anywhere close to commercial viability right now. Current battery tech is just too heavy for economic viability right now and that doesn't look likely to change in the near future. Battery power density will have to increase substantially.
The issues are more economic - the initial cost, the cost of time on the ground charnging, and safety - like the tendency to burst into flames for no adequately-explained reason.
While those are all important things to consider, THE primary metric that matters is cost per distance traveled of a kg of cargo. Everything else is secondary.
On a flight of less than 500 km, a quarter of the energy is used in the takeoff, so some kind of ground to aircraft power transfer is something you might actually consider for the very start of a flight. Maybe not a cable, but possibly an electric catapult, or supercapacitor "drop tanks".
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> 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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What could possibly go wrong with widespread deployment of that?
The US has around 1.1 - 1.3 fatal accidents per 100K miles for general aviation. For comparison, motor vehicles have about 1.2 deaths per MILLION miles.
General aviation includes larger planes like bizjets, basically everything except airliners & freightliners, so you can be sure the accident rates is much higher for tiny planes, e.g. several tens of thousands of miles per death. Even if automated control reduced the accident rate some, that's still crazy high.
I think I'll just stick to cliff diving.
LI-Ion/LI Polymer batteries don't have quite the power/weight of conventional fuel,
Not by a long shot. Jet fuel is around 42.8 MJ/kg, and LiPo batteries are around 1.8 MJ/kg. So you need around 24 kg of LiPo batteries to equal the energy in a kilogram of jet fuel. LiIon is even worse, with 0.875 MJ/kg, meaning you need about 50 kg of LiIon to equal a kg of jet fuel.
Petroleum products are insanely energy-dense things, and they allow for extremely quick recovery of all that energy. Most nuclear, and things like diesel, allow for more energy (orders of magnitude in terms of nuclear) density per kg but it is a lot harder to extract the energy quickly - like needed when climbing.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Errrm, no. Let me introduce you to coffin corner,
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
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.
Amongst commonly used Li-ion battery chemistries, lithium cobalt oxide has the highest energy density. Cobalt is the next-door neighbor to iron in the periodic table. In the future, we may see lithium sulfur batteries, which are better. But it's still nowhere near hydrocarbons, which consists of some of the lightest elements: O, C and H.
One kg of jet fuel contains 42.8 MJ of energy. To match that, you would need 23 kg of LiS. If a jet normally carries 5 tons of fuel, now it needs to carry 115 tons of batteries. And since a jet can't simply take off with so much extra weight, it must either replace what it was carrying - passengers and luggage - with batteries, or fly a route that's only 3% as long.
So... how exactly is your electric plane going to propel itself without air?