[TheSpiceIsLife]

More accurately, the calculation needs to factor in the fact that battery weight doesn’t decrease as charge is used.

Commercial aviation’s profitability hinges on being able to carry only as much fuel as strictly[1] required.

How can batteries compete with that constraint?

Also, commercial aviation aircraft aren’t time-restricted by refuelling requirements. How are batteries going to compete with that? Realistically, a busy airport would need something like a closely located gigawatt scale power plant with multi-gigawatt peaking capacity to recharge multiple 737 / A320 type aircraft simultaneously.

I don’t believe energy density parity with jet fuel is sufficient. My back of the neocortex estimate is that battery energy density would need to 10x jet fuel to be of much practical use in the case of narrow-body-and-up airliner usefulness.

[WalterBright]

You laid it out better than I. Thank you!

[TheSpiceIsLife]

Thanks Walter!

[abdullahkhalids]

An A320 can store 24k liters of fuel. Jet fuel stores 35 MJ/L. So, the plane carries 8.4E11 J of energy. If that was stored in a battery that had to be charged in an hour 0.23GW of electric power would be required.

So indeed, an airport serving dozens or hundreds of electric aircrafts a day will need obscene amounts of electric energy.

[vardump]

Jet engines are not 100% efficient.

Electric motors can be pretty close, 98% is realistic. Of course other parts of the system will lose energy, like conversion losses.

Of course that doesn't mean batteries are currently a viable replacement. One should still take efficiency into account in quick back of the envelope calculations.

[TheSpiceIsLife]

Halve it to 0.11G then.

It makes no difference, we’d still need gigawatt scale electricity production, with some multiple of that at peak, just for a fairly unremarkable airport.