[Spinnaker_]

The mention of air travel was strange. I wasn't aware of anyone who thought long range flight would ever be electrified. At least not without some fundamental breakthrough.

S-curves are hard to predict. Basically every time someone attempts to do it, they are way off. This [0] is a neat paper that addresses the question. We've blown past every single prediction.

[0] https://www.inet.ox.ac.uk/files/energy_transition_paper-INET...

[audunw]

Why do you mention long range flight? I don't see anything in the article saying batteries will take 100% of the airplane market.

It does say batteries will start to take market share in 2030. That's almost certainly true. It's a high priority for the Norwegian company to electrify the short distance airplane network in the next coming years. There are already battery electric planes coming out. And battery chemistries suitable for short range planes are starting early production.

I suspect battery electric plane will get a surprisingly good range once we start to get highly optimized battery chemistries and optimized airplane designs for that market. The hardest part is to get the first few products to mass market.

They might creep into the medium range market by 2050.

But long range? It might never happen. Unless we get something like aluminum-air batteries that can exploit oxygen in the air somehow. But it doesn't matter. Long range flights are not the majority of flights. It's a small enough market that e-fuels could cover it.

Since flying battery electric will be so much cheaper it's also possible people will have to switch planes multiple times on a journey. Maybe there will be some innovations/optimizations that make that faster and easier.

[brigade]

Long haul might not be the majority of flights by number, but they account for ~40% of the emissions from commercial aviation (well more accurately, wide-bodies do.) Regional flights that are prime targets to go fully electric only account for around 6% of emissions.

But you're right that starting somewhere is better than not doing that.

[NotSammyHagar]

There are some very early stage tests, there is some kind of island hopper electric airplane that flys regular service, and it's only like 5 or 10 miles across water.

Batteries will get more energy dense, the range will increase a bit. But yeah, it's hard to see it getting to a few 100 miles.

[pramsey]

Testing and development by an actual operational airline, but running into regulation and certification issues. Could be a while even for this relatively narrow use case of seaplane flights of under an hour duration. Interesting update. https://harbourair.com/earth-day-eplane-update/

In terms of battery density, the fact that they have an operational, flyable aircraft, just stuffing batteries and an electric motor into a 60 year old air frame... pretty good and only going to get better!

[KolmogorovComp]

Hello, do you have a link or name?

[schiffern]

Here's the link, but the range isn't as bad as they said.

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/eviation-announces-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eviation_Alice

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Air

[kccqzy]

There's also an electric "flying water taxi" https://sfstandard.com/2024/01/18/san-francisco-navier-elect...

[PaulHoule]

I read a book in the 1980s about how you could fit S-curves to predict everything.

When I've actually tried it with tools like

https://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/reference/generated/scipy.o...

it's frequently been terribly, terribly wrong.

[nielsbot]

Can we use excess solar energy to create synthetic fuel (hydrogen?) to power jets?

I know almost nothing about this space. I would appreciate a comment on why this is feasible or not...

[NotSammyHagar]

There are people researching it, I believe Airbus is about to test flying with hydrogen. It's the usual thing though for "green hydrogen", there's not much green hydrogen, there are some testbeds but just like for cars it seems to be mostly extracted from natural gas. You can extract it with any energy source like solar power. There's still the challenge that hydrogen fuel is not very compact, so it's hard to carry enough energy (in a car or plane) for much use, you end up with very very high pressure tanks. I think hydrogen will make sense eventually for trucks, tractors maybe. The question is will the massive investments in improving batteries make hydrogen vehicles obsolete or not.

There are also research programs about making fuel from other sources, like https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016523702...

[nielsbot]

Answering my own question: Looks like there's something called solar fuel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_fuel

[Spinnaker_]

If advances in solar continue, yes. Currently, the IRA provides very lucrative investment and tax credits for green hydrogen projects (solar and wind powered electrolyzers). Power producers like AES are already building multi-billion dollar projects, and there are a lot more in the pipeline. One day the tax credits may not be needed for this to be economically feasible.

Companies like terraform industries are doing something similar, but creating natural gas. With enough cheap solar, all hydrocarbons are pretty much on the table as well.

It'll be a decade or more until this is scaled up and not dependent on subsidies.