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by anovikov 3378 days ago
Why not, a jet powered plane can fly 17,300km, electric plane must have about 2x energy efficiency (70-80% vs 35-40% overall) because it's not a heat machine, so with 50x less energy density it translates to 700km. Actually it can be more because batteries are a lot denser than jet fuel so plane will be thinner, thus having a lot less air resistance, so 800km is possible. As you can see they are shooting for 500km, must be easily possible.

Airbus works on a 1000km battery powered regional plane (catch is, it's probably a turboprop) by 2030, by the way.

1 comments

You've contradicted yourself by saying that batteries are both less and more dense than jet fuel...
LOL energy density is much much lower, but volumetric density is several times higher. Meaning, they take less space for same weight -> airframe can have smaller profile and have less air resistance.
I don't think that's true, both volumetric and mass densities for lithium ion batteries are very low (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/Energy_d...).