Originally Posted by
ecto1
Yeah, dream all you want. BTDT. When you have 400 times less energy per kg, all things considered, no amount of politics will make it a viable alternative for airborne trasport. Period.
You can reduce it to a 40 times worse by using the best batteries, and the best engines and the best engine drivers and then bending the numbers up to their ultimate tensile strength, but there you hit a wall. That 300wh/kg of that fantanstic battery from maxwell (which I totally not believe) means a total 1.08Mj/kg. Gas has 46.4Mj/kg.
Except that the former is ideal conditions and the latter is always. Usual problems nobody tells you until it's too late:
- You cannot extract all the energy from a battery, no matter at which rate you do it.
- You cannot extract any energy from a battery if it is freezing.
- The energy you get from a battery is inversely proportional to how fast you discharge it and how cold it is.
- You may trade energy density at the cost of power density, so never pay attention to a number without the other.
- After each cycle, battery stores less and less energy.
A typical bad case scenario (typical bad load profile, typical bad temperature, typical bad wear...) is several times worse that the ideal. Only you need to guarantee the range in any sort of vehicle in typical bad scenarios. Gas is not affected by any of that, LI-ON is.
Many politicians have been fooled already and many more will, but this is a dead end until somebody invents a 40x better battery.
No-one has come up with an electric solution for air transport, nor is any credible source claiming it.
But in certain applications, electric doesn't just make sense, it's highly preferable- such as training which this aircraft is aimed at.
Another is self launching/ sustainer engines for gliders, there are already several commercially available.