WUWT reader “Non Nomen” writes:
Norway now wants to electrify domestic air traffic by 2040.
Will they be able to recharge at every overhead power line?
If they are on medication, they’d better stop that.
If not, they’d better take their pills.
Medication aside, I don’t think these people understand the concept and difficulty of scaling up such technology.
Here is another video worth watching:
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This is what happens when your brain is frozen for ten months out of the year.
This probably makes more sense for Norway than most countries. It’s very mountainous. This can make air travel highly advantageous for even quite short journeys, providing there are airstrips. It also means they have plenty of cheap hydro power.
Norway ? That’s quite north as the name says. Mountains rugged terrain, downdrafts, uncharted power lines, quite a specific set of quickly evolving weather systems, limited battery endurance. Ok, I’m out of there.
Powerlines are well charted. Icing and diversions due to changeable weather are much worse problems.
There are some very short segments with few passengers up in the Lofoten archipelago, e. g. Bodö-Röst, Bodö-Svolvär and Bodö-Leknes, all three about 100 kilometers (65 miles). These might conceivably be practicable for electrical aircraft by 2040. Unfortunately the area has rather difficult weather conditions.
Glad powerlines are charted and fjord buzzing got probably safer. Yet…
Such short legs in energy strapped and probably unpressurized birds would route into and not above the weather. That is into this kind of all option packs included northern style weather system.
Good thing, they can save weight on weather radars, weather detours being quite no-no with only that much of electrons to drive the props.
White knuckles…
However this electric aviation scam is actually quite easy to debunk. Surprisingly they seem to let choppers out of the equation. I don’t talk of drones on steroids and the inherent autorotation problems in case of engine failure.
I mean real choppers, the kind that can safely fly with even modest 4-bangers.
The green aviation gurus stay safely away from the rotary wings topic. Maybe they finally have an instinctive perception on how much energy choppers need…
So them do-gooders continue their efforts to persuade us that motorized gliders or multi-engine kites as the future of mankind.
The ambition is to have pure electric aircraft on some very short flights (20-40 min) where there are very few passenger (5-7) per flight. We have a couple of those in this country. The dream part of it is to have this available in 5-7 years.
For the 2040-ambition they are really talking about hybrids, although when in the mass media they say ‘eletric’ about everything.
The case for hybrids is to reduce the main power plant by using the batteries for power application, i.e. take-off and climbs. With current state-of-the-art batteries it will give a total weight penalty, but reduce emissions per flight as long as it uses plug-in hydropower for battery charging.
Norway has no domestic production of aircraft. I believe the global market for hydropower plug-in hybrid aircraft is rather small.
And while there are a lot of promising battery chemistries out there, history has shown that they are large on promise and small on delivery. In the lab you get fantastic properties, but by the time they come in industrial size applications with the packaging and auxiliary systems needed for safety and reliable operation they tend to be where they are today: 250 Wh/kg for energy, and power at the cost of storage and life cycle.
BTW, I work with electric and hybrid systems for maritime applications. They have made tremendous progress in the last 5-6 years, but we are at the top of the asymtote now.You still have to choose between going for power or energy – can’t have both with batteries.
Howard Hughes’ spruce goose also went briefly airborne and never flew again.
I have a private pilot’s license and have a few comments. 1 – most initial training consists of two passengers. How does that impact performance? Not clear from the video. 2 – what is the transition like to the next larger aircraft, as that would most likely not be electric? 3 – I didn’t hear a cost and couldn’t find one on their website. Most of the current crop of Cessnas are 30 yrs old at least and are well paid for.
As usual they hype is well ahead of the fact.
The plane in the video is light enough to be wheeled around by one man.
If someone wanted to build an electric plane capable of carrying 10 passengers, how much more battery weight would it need? Could it fly into a headwind and not be blown backward? How much range would it have?
Another question nobody seems to ask–why bother building an all-electric plane anyway? The energy used to charge the battery of the electric plane probably came from a fossil-fuel fired power plant with a stack some 100 to 200 feet above the ground. A commercial jet burning kerosene has most of its emissions 30,000 feet or so above the ground. Using an electric plane is actually moving the emissions closer to the ground.
Yes… we have developed two different electric airplanes…. one can taxi and fly to the end of the runway… and the other has enough capacity to fly 150 miles, but it takes a bulldozer to pull it out of the hanger.
Who says that electrical aircraft have no practical uses?
A pilot-only electric helicopter from Sikorsky:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikorsky_Firefly
Practical helicopter obviously awaits greater power density from batteries. Breakthrough in understanding Si-air battery problem from 2016 promises such improvements:
https://phys.org/news/2016-07-silicon-air-battery-hours.html
But quiet operation a plus for short commuter hopes from home to work, then recharge while on the job for the return flight.