Have been taking an interest in the gradual developments of electric aircraft recently, and one of the major players in attempting to develop an A320 sized jet is EasyJet and Wright Electric. It will be interesting to see how close to the 2030 target they are able to get a fully electric airliner into service. There is quite a lot of cynicism about electric aircraft being scaled up, but looking at how rapid things are improving in the automotive landscape I'm quite confident that the lessons learned and efficiency improvements will quickly help the aero industry.
Current estimate is for the motors to be flight tested in 2023, with a 186 seat airliner with a 300nm (345mi) range to go into service in 2030:
https://www.flightglobal.com/program...136456.article
This made me wonder, how many routes do EasyJet currently have that are under 300nm, and the answer is quite a few (47 from the UK by my quick count/trawl through Wiki). Also, many of these routes are quite high volume (UK-AMS/CDG, BFS-rest of UK) so aircraft would be quite well utilised.
Link to map:
Great Circle Mapper
Ideally, you would want a small amount of extra range (probably 350nm/403mi) to cover some of the longer trunk routes (MAN-CDG, LGW-EDI/GLA are just out of range). It will be interesting to consider how such an operation would affect the utilisation of the jets, since they often fly a variety of sector lengths on any given day. I also wonder if (slot concerns aside), a fairly cheap to fly electric aircraft would help boost domestic aviation in the UK - routes like LGW-MAN/NCL likely make a lot more sense when not being flown by an aircraft that is able to fly almost 20x the distance with a full load.