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by asdfadsfgfdda
2136 days ago
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Jet fuel is ~36 kWh/gallon raw energy density (13 kWh/gallon mechanical power assuming 35% engine efficiency). The pre-covid jet fuel price was $2/gallon, or $.15/kWh. The average price of commercial electricity is $.06/kWh in America, or $.08/kWh including charging/motor efficiency. This cost will definitely be higher if you only buy clean electricity, and this ignores battery wear out. But where the economics break down is aircraft utilization. If charge time is greater than ~1 hour typical turn time, all of your costs will grow. Capital cost, crew costs, and airport infrastructure cost will increase. To charge in <1 hr is a challenge, you need a huge power source (tens of megawatts per plane) and serious cooling. |
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Aircraft refueling generally runs in-ground (at the largest airports), then 5-10k gallon trucks (~20-40k liters), then ~500-2000 gallon smaller trucks (2k-10k liters) for smaller aircraft or smaller airports.
If you reimagined refueling trucks as "forklifts carrying batteries" instead of "tubes of gasoline on wheels" then you'd likely end up with similar delivery practices (central charging, swap/refuel, discard/recharge batteries instead of refilling the fuel tank on a fuel truck).
Effectively it would be standardizing on some way to slot-in pre-charged batteries, and treat them similar to a propane tank rental company, where each removed battery is considered suspect and tested/refurbished/recharged after each use.
Otherwise, yeah, putting a bunch of 220v outlets in the ground around an airport... you're going to be sitting there a while to recharge the ten planes that landed that day. It'd effectively be untenable for smaller airports to be able to provide "quick-turn" refueling services, and potentially risky to be able to guarantee overnight refueling.
This is all nudging towards personal / corporate aircraft, not commercial aircraft operations, which would "never" want the plane in more than one spot for more than one hour, which would require something similar to battery-swaps that they control, OR some very fancy electrical and heat management associated with the airport/jetbridge that the plane pulls up at.