Just going off the tweet about electric scooters being a scam: Nothing in that tweet is convincing.
Let's just take at face value the assertion that a KWh of energy in an electric scooter costs $5 (as an EV owner: I'm skeptical).
I'm going to use Lime (an SF based scooter rental company, chosen at random) as an example. I tried finding exact battery specs, and couldn't, but based on the range and some general scooter efficiency metrics I found, I doubt it has even a full KWh capacity, but let's round up, and assume that when fully charged, it has $5 worth of electricity in it.
Lime is charging $1.00 to unlock and $0.50/minute of use (somewhat cheaper with the subscription).
The claimed top speed is ~15 mph with a range of 20-30 miles. Let's the take the lower range value there. So assuming that the scooter is doing nothing but driving at it's full top speed for the entire rental period, it would use up the battery in ~1.3 hours. That's a total rental fee of ~$39. Doing nothing but driving it full speed seems like an unlikely use case, so I think this represents a close to worst-case scenario for rental fee paid to electricity used.
Now, I don't know what the rest of the overhead is. So I'm not going to claim that this is an obviously profitable business model, but the electricity costs in this equation are not the reason why it's going to fail.
If the author thinks that this tweet is a slam dunk, I'm not going to bother reading the rest of the article. I too am skeptical of batteries utility in flight especially, but there are probably better sources to get those analyses from.
He is for some reason comparing the levelized cost of energy. This is a metric used to analyze energy generating devices, not energy consuming devices.
His tweet says that if you wanted to buy electricity from an electric scooter and use it to run your house, it would cost the utility providing it $2 to $5/kWh, assuming that the sole function of the scooter is to provide its electricity to consumers directly.
LCOE goes up the further you get from the source, but his analysis is also based on outdated numbers and largely wrong.
That said, he isn’t totally wrong. Electric
marine has a tough road ahead of itself due to the inefficiency of boats relative to cars. Boats can be calculated roughly as a car that is always going somewhat uphill.
Electric planes are a niche use case for the foreseeable future.
Electric marine operations seems like it makes more sense if you plan to do something clever with solar panels to generate electricity as you go, rather then try to store it all up front (I don't know what, flexible solar panels on a big parasail maybe?)
Driving it full speed is how you drive these things. They are safer when the speed delta is minimal between you and the rest of the traffic and you are charged by the minute so the incentive is full speed short of obligatory stopping for traffic lights or stops (really blown through) or slight slowing for turns.
Battery estimates fwiw are very optimistic on the app in my experience. Assume error of 1/3 in range to be safe.
Was going to post something similar. I love me a screed where the author rails against some group saying they don't know what they are talking about, and then goes on to demonstrate that they don't know what they are talking about. :-)
For a long time I didn't understand what 'talking past each other' meant but this article is a good example of that. Mostly it's bad form to make sweeping generalizations. But let's be specific;
From the article, here is the "TL;DR" --
Lithium propulsion for aircraft and boats is fundamentally unprofitable across the entire U.S. grid. The numbers don't lie: 60× worse energy density than jet fuel, 3.3× higher operating costs, 22% reduced asset utilization, and payback periods that consume 2/3 of the asset's lifespan. Anyone claiming otherwise is ignoring basic physics or hiding most of the energy and economic costs.
So first let's talk definitions. "profit" is, by definition, "gross revenue" - "costs". "costs" come in two flavors, "direct", "marginal", and "operational". Direct costs are what you pay, every time for the thing you need. Marginal cost is what you pay for just "a bit more" of the thing you need. And operational costs are the costs you pay so that you can operate your business.
So there is a direct cost of a lithium battery which is included in the manufacturing of a widget, there is the marginal cost of charging that battery up to full capacity, and there is the operational cost of maintaining the battery and presumably repairing or replacing it, when it doesn't do what you ask of it any more.
There is a fourth cost, which is "externalities", that covers the cost of remediating the environmental damage which is done by your energy source and while important, and the focus of climate change awareness, its rarely considered in the discussion of 'profitable' vs. 'unprofitable.'
If we keep this discussion on "lithium" which is the "gas" of these transportation modalities. You can say that building a battery pack is much more expensive than building a gas tank. So cost wise a gas is cheaper. The marginal cost of energy in Watts between gasoline and electricity leans heavily in electric's favor for a number of reasons. The operational costs of fueling and maintaining the "source power" for electric cars nominally similar.
But all of that, has to be put into the context of the system cost which includes vehicle fabrication, power 'converters' (aka motors) that turn fuel
into motion, and mechanical maintenance.
Then you jump into a bigger frame of reference and consider all transportation modalities and how they combine as a system to get someone from point A to point B, and what are the costs of building, expanding, and operating that?
The author doesn't see a path between 'here' and what they know to 'there' where Lithium batteries have "improved" non-vehicle transportation modalities over what fossil fuels can do. That's fair, I don't see one either precisely, but there are interesting paths to explore. Foreclosing one's thinking to possibilities on those paths is not usually the right thing to do. A better strategy is to think about it in terms of what would have to be true in order for these paths to be viable updates to the way we travel/ship/transport.
Jumbo jets won't be electrified anytime soon. Weight (and thus, energy density/kg) is everything. But synthetic fuels, hydrogen etc might be good options.
But there's also short-haul flights. Routes with say, 15..20min between take-off & landing. For such flights, electric aircraft is entirely feasible. And being done (successfully) in some places. Not to mention eg. training aircraft.
Boats: veeerry different. Weight isn't a biggie, neither is volume. And there's short-haul ferries, long(er)-haul ferries, cruise ships, 10000+ container giants, tug boats, recreational boats that hardly ever leave lakes/canals/rivers, sailboats with engine that's mostly used while entering/leaving port but not out @ sea, etc etc.
Each of these have their own economics. Where they're used and (energy) infrastructure there, is also a factor. Container giant on Asia-Europe route? Good luck electrifying that. Small tourist boat doing 20..30km/day in a natural park? Electric is a no-brainer, today.
And there's existing vessels vs. newly built ones. Most boats get old (like aircraft), more so than cars. Retrofits can be difficult/expensive. But for yet-to-build boats, different story.
Lumping that all in 1 aircraft/boat category, and claiming "uneconomical!" is just dumb.
> Jumbo jets won't be electrified anytime soon. Weight (and thus, energy density/kg) is everything. But synthetic fuels, hydrogen etc might be good options.
That's making me think that hydrogen-filled airships (Zeppelins/dirigibles) might be practical with some kind of electric propulsion. That way, the weight is no longer so much of an issue, though the trade-off is that they'll need to be bigger. Their speed (or slowness) could be an advantage in that they should be much easier to fly and collisions would hopefully be infrequent and not so catastrophic (I'm picturing more of a bounce than a collision).
In the larger discuss is of course, solar panels, and how they can be installed cheaply enough and with enough storage to make it feasible. Vertical integration is the key here and yes it's additional initial capital outlay, but if someone wants to run the numbers, I bet there's somewhere where it makes sense.
He is wrong on the price of electricity by a factor of 100. The LCOE of solar and Bess is below cost of coal in China already ie around $0.04-0.05/kwh. Recently UAE signed a contract for 1 Gwh 24 hour solar and BESS supply for 10 years at around $6 billion which is approximately $0.07/kwh but after 10 years the solar and batteries will still be working at 85-90% capacity cost 0.
I cant say about planes but as far as ocean freight shipping goes we are very close to the tipping point. Battery prices have already reached a point where it is cheaper to go battery electric for small voyages.
A bit later, he claims the lifetime cost of a vehicle is $345/kwh. It’s unclear if that’s capacity (an SUV with a $100kwh battery costs $34.5K new, which is the low end of retail pricing, and actually great news), or energy costs (that SUV will cost $34.5M over its lifetime, assuming 1000 charge cycles), which is clearly off by a factor of >100.
Either way, he concludes the time to payoff of switching to the planes is 2/3rds their expected lifetimes. I didn’t get far enough to find out what that’s versus, but most airlines would happily roll over to a new technology that “only” reduced their fleet costs by 33%.
For comparison, the 737 MAX reduced fuel costs by 14% and is still selling despite all the safety issues.
Edit: My 33% math is a bit off. It assumes the fuel costs dominate. Still, payoff before end of life is still saving money.
“Gasoline’s dirty secret: it’s toxic, expensive and using it kills the planet.”
This type of framing is utterly pointless, and tries to make out like electric propulsion shouldn’t be used for anything because it’s not ideal for everything.
Even if we never get to everyday electric planes (debatable), that has zero bearing on the fact electric cars are already excellent for many uses.
It took my wife and I actually buying an electric car and running it for a few months to actually convince family members that electric cars are a worthwhile technology.
They were fervently against us buying one, so much so that we had to avoid conversation about it and outright lie to them about our intentions.
"You can't take it on a driving holiday."
Yeah, we'll manage with one of our other two existing cars for that, like we have when we've taken one of our previous once every couple of years driving holidays.
"You can't tow with it."
Thank fuck, I hate towing and I can't remember towing anything in the last 15 years.
The electric car, a Nissan Leaf, is perfect for 99% of our use cases. The whole family love it. It's our "first in best dressed" car.
Even smart people are fucking stupid about plenty of things.
His estimate the LCoE of an electric vehicle with lithium batteries is off by a factor of ten. My back-of-the-napkin calculations make it to be $0.22–0.25 per kWh.
Let's compare two vehicles - an EV car vs an ICE car - in terms of their energy costs per mile, including energy storage. Using the above numbers the EV comes out to around $0.07 per mile including the lifetime costs of the battery, and the ICE comes out to around $0.125 per mile.
In short - his numbers are completely wrong and when calculated correctly prove the opposite of what he's trying to say.
> Let's compare two vehicles - an EV car vs an ICE car -
Ok, but TFA is about planes (and boats), not cars. That's a big caveat because neither planes nor boats can do regenerative braking, and planes need to be light. Boats can get big enough to float even if the power plant is heavy, though there is a maximum to what is reasonable.
Another way (from first principles): Assume you buy two cars per driver. The driver parks one car at their solar panels at a time, so one is available for use 100% of the time, and at least one can charge off the panels 100% of the time.
Assume a 10kw solar system with no batteries, but with a level 2 charger. That costs $28K this year. Assume $50K per car. The system cost is $128K.
Assume the climate is such that you can charge the cars at 6kw (max output of the charger) for an average of 8 hours a day (pessimistic in summer, optimistic in winter).
This setup should last about 10 years. (Or sell the cars after 5 and get money back for new cars.)
That’s 365 * 10 * 8h * 6kw usable for the cars, or 175.2MWh, giving us $0.73 per kWh. Clearly the sky is falling. I’m going to get a steam engine for my buggy!
I forgot to figure the depreciation of the cars. We wasted one because this scheme is dumb, so the depreciation for an equivalent ICE car would be zero. For the other car, I think it’s reasonable to assume 90% depreciation. Say the ICE car depreciates $40K. We can sell the two EVs for a total of $10K. Now the total cost (sans car) for the system is $78K, or $0.445 per kwh — cheaper than California’s grid.
I forgot to figure interest on the $78K of capital. At 8% average return, that’s a bit over 2x, getting it closer to a dollar per kwh.
For a 4 mile/kwh car, that’s $0.25/mile. Of course, if you assume the existence of civilization, then the price drops a lot. For instance you could only buy one car, and you could size the solar smaller, or also plug the house into it.
Anyway, in my hypothetical mad maxian hellscape that’s experiencing healthy, steady economic growth and has access to cheap refined gasoline, he’s still off by a factor of 2.5x.
This appears to ignore the new technology that electric brings in: Reduced maintenance, (for aircraft) reduced weight in other parts of an aircraft, new propulsion capabilities that increase efficiency of the energy used, new performance envelopes (like flying much higher because the physics are totally different), etc etc. Sure. Take an existing vehicle optimized for burning things and just swap that small part and things look bad but start optimizing for the new way of doing things and the equation totally changes. Additionally, that 60x claim is getting old by the minute. We are getting to 300+ with advancements coming in so fast they are hard to keep track of. That 60x could drop to 10x or lower in just a few years and that, again, doesn't count the reduction in weight that could come from removing a literal explosion maker from an aircraft can achieve.
There is a cute little two-seater electric airplane used as a trainer.[1] Gets about 50 minutes on a charge. EHang has demonstrated 48 minutes of flight with their flying car (a 16-rotor drone). Expect to see those at the 2028 Olympics, ferrying VIPs around Los Angeles. But energy density is too low for long trips.
The bigger problem is that the overall weight increases. Rearranging the COG doesn't really matter when most of your energy is spent literally fighting gravity.
This is the first thing that popped up in google when I wanted to compare gravimetric density between gasoline and lithium ion batteries. Gasoline is still approximately 30x denser. That is at least one revolutionary breakthrough in battery technology away, if not several.
Considering the thermal efficiency of a modern jet engine, the usable energy compared to a lithium battery will be ~15 higher per kg, still bad, but not as bad.
Also some napkin math using common examples gives a range of 0.2 - 1.2 horsepower / kg for gasonline motors, and 8 - 21 horsepower / kg for electric. So even though the batteries weigh more, the motors weigh less.
Container boats are ridiculously carbon efficient because they move unimaginable amounts of weight (amortizing any fixed costs like keeping the engine running) slowly (low drag) over a perfectly level surface (no loss from going up hill).
Almost any carbon reduction scheme that involves doing anything other than using them doesn’t work.
For instance, the embodied carbon of an apple that goes from China to the US, then is driven to a Walmart in a diesel train / semi is probably lower than the carbon footprint of one from the local farmers market (unless the farmer drives the apples to market in an EV and the local power grid is low carbon).
Right and it's precisely because they can have unimaginable amounts of weight that it's a more tractable thing to solve compared to electric planes.
I don't think the article is debating cargo ship vs car carbon footprint here, it's just the feasibility of electric cargo ship vs bunker fuel cargo ship. (And planes, which seems way harder)
Airplanes don't get to do regenerative braking except briefly upon landing, but you're not going to put generators in the wheels just for that, and you need active thrust reversers, so really there is simply no room for regenerating power in electric planes.
There’s no reason why you couldn’t do regen when descending with an electric-powered prop plane. It would give a steeper descent than normal, and may not be more efficient overall than cutting power earlier and descending more gradually, but it could be done.
Wheeled vehicles have lots of opportunities for braking, but airplanes and boats not so much, so even if you could do regenerative braking (which you probably can't) it'd not be enough to be worth doing. It's a loss compared to wheeled EVs of 30%-50%.
And then airplanes typically need to be lighter when landing than when taking off, and jet fuel has the nice properties that a) as you use it up what you've left weighs less, b) you can toss enough jet fuel to get to landing weight if need be. Batteries have neither of those properties, which means that electric airplanes would have to be built much sturdier (i.e., heavier, therefore more expensive and less efficient) to handle heavy landings, or would have to carry less cargo / fewer passengers per unit of stored energy (i.e., less efficient).
I'm afraid that no matter how good wheeled EVs get, it's going to require a whole new kind of battery before you can ever get to practical. large electric airplanes.
Electric will start smaller and build up to big just like everything else. The single and twin engine world is pretty dominated by structure so the gains are easy to see there. As new capabilities and designs are prooven out things will grow or, and this is what I really hope for, we will find that we don't need the massive aircraft to be profitable anymore and we will just get more smaller electric aircraft providing the service in a more point to point nature. One of the biggest efficiency gains we could have is not forcing people into a hub and spoke mega airport model, something that isn't practical with the current massive aircraft tech.
The point was the other parts of the plane. No lines moving all that gas around and the pumps and the plumbing in and around the engine and the bleed air piping and the and the and the.... There are a lot of potential places to shave weight when you go electric. An aircraft optimized for electric will be massively different if done right.
The way jetliners scale shaving the weight of those things (and note that you're not counting the weight of electric cables that can carry hundreds of amps) is nothing. It might be something for tiny airplanes, but that's it.
"Additionally, that 60x claim is getting old by the minute. We are getting to 300+ with advancements coming in so fast they are hard to keep track of. That 60x could drop to 10x or lower in just a few years"
What was a Tesla Model S power density 10 years ago? Today? Hardware moves slower than you think. All your points have some basis of consideration but the potential performance improvements they represent are tiny compared to the single huge downside of having to fly a giant, heavy battery everywhere and that is not going to change anytime soon.
Density is going up exponentially in the graph because it has been improving 18% for every doubling of the number shipped. Global EV market share is projected to cross 25% this year, so we should expect two more 18% improvements as it approaches 100%. That should improve density 39%. Then (ignoring batteries sold so far, and assuming there are no new markets for lithium batteries), we’ll see another 18% in 2 years (164% of current density), 4 (193%) 8 (228%), and so on until some theoretical limit is hit.
In all likelihood, some other technology will replace lithium batteries at some point. That further improves the density numbers.
Other than potentially reducing maintenance costs, I'm not sure any other part of this stacks up. I don't see how electrification would allow you to save weight in other parts of the aircraft. I don't think electrification adds any new propulsion capabilities that are more energy efficient, not for airplanes or boats anyway. For boats, the electricity would still be turning a screw and for airplanes the only method of propulsion that would work is an old-fashioned propellor. That last is the same reason you can't fly electric planes in new performance envelopes: prop planes can't get that high and wouldn't work if they somehow found themselves up there. Even turbo-prop planes (which have gas turbines that enable them to work more efficiently at high altitudes) are limited in altitude by the fact that the tips of the propellors are going very nearly the speed of sound.
Storing and producing aviation grade fuel is a considerable expense and logistics chain (unleaded AVgas replacements are still not generally approved - if you live near a small airport you've been getting dusted with lead fumes for decades).
An electric plane dispenses with that: it can functionally be charged up anywhere there's any sort of electric service.
I suspect that there's niches where battery electric boats and maybe planes do make sense.
My state's ferry system is investing in electrifying, because they project it reduce operating costs. The 'easy' part is moving towards hybrid systems that can move with diesel or battery; this is projected to save fuel even without shore charging. The hard part will be making shore charging work. Our grid is mostly hydro, so switching from diesel to electric should be better for emissions and the operating budget.
If the routes were longer, shore charging wouldn't be very relevant, but they're short enough that many routes could work without diesel most of the time.
Where I live companies are moving to electric ferries because they’re cheaper to operate, require less maintenance, and are much quieter for the passengers. Plus they don’t emit any exhaust fumes while idling at the dock.
The port also has an electric tug boat, which their reports say is very handy because it changes power output much faster than diesel tugs. Charging times are not a factor according to their reports.
Our power grid is 80+% renewable though.
Of course the article ignores that it’s easier to improve the emissions of a few large powerplants than every car, ferry and scooter, and that the minerals in batteries don’t disappear after use.
An analysis of the Nordic ferry systems ten years ago found that 70% would benefit from electrification —- about 45% could go fully electric, while about 25% made more sense as hybrid.
This means for them 30% didn’t make sense to electrify.
This was Siemens making the case for selling electric boat parts, so presumably this was best case at the time.
We also have electric ferries here in Antwerp and Ostend. I don't think they're hybrid, although it's not clear when they get charged, I would assume during the wait times (about 15 minutes wait and 5 minutes ferrying) but I have not noticed them actually connecting anywhere, maybe I just haven't noticed though. The communication says it can sail for three hours on batteries, so they must charge during the day while operating.
And at my other place around Nantes they're building a new ferry that is supposed to be hybrid electric/hydrogen. I'm not very optimistic on hydrogen though so I don't know. The latest info say the budget has tripled and the delivery has been reported from 2026 to 2030.
I have also seen designs for ferries to wirelessly charge underwater while docked.
Wireless charging can be quite efficient when the two halves comprise nesting physical features with similar tolerances to actual transformers. But I have not seen this implemented, presumably due to biofouling problems.
For the marine uses specifically, the use of hydrofoils promises to dramatically reduce the amount of energy needed for movement at any decent speed.
Previously hydrofoils weren't used because they rely on complex feedback mechanisms to maintain ride height despite waves etc.
Sure, someone could pair hydrofoils with gasoline engines, but I suspect they won't, and that means hydrofoil+electric will win out over conventional hull+hydrocarbon fuels for a bunch of use cases.
Probably not. Hydrofoil boats work OK, but few applications need the speed. The US Navy went through a period of hydrofoil enthusiasm, and built some.[1] Boeing built a hydrofoil ferry, and some are still in service. The Navy version used 10x as much fuel per hour in hydrofoil mode, running off a gas turbine. Of course, it was going fast in that mode.
Speed is key to profitability for most usecases. If you are transporting people from A to B, and you can do it in half the time, then you can make twice as many trips per day, doubling revenue (or, if there isn't enough demand, you can buy a smaller boat and reduce your capital costs whilst maintaining the same revenue).
And thats before you consider that by going faster you might win more marketshare because the users want the fastest route. And you can often charge extra per person/per ton for faster/express services.
Not in shipping. See "Slow Steaming".[1] Most container ships could go much faster than they normally do.
Sadly, the S.S. United States, the fastest transatlantic liner ever, is about to be disposed of by sinking.[2] 35 knot top speed. Southampton to New York in 3.5 days. No market for that once air travel crossed the Atlantic.
They use t foil catamarans on the catalina express route. Diesel engines and water jet not gasoline though. Ride is about an hour to avalon from the port of long beach.
I recently read The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson, and one of the ideas in it that I thought was very good was replacing our cargo ships with wind-powered ships, basically giant sailing ships. In the book, they were incredibly slow, with shipments taking months to complete, but if supply lines were set up correctly, that wouldn't matter for a lot of cargo. Cargo ships are a massive CO2 contributor, and it was interesting that a solution could be to return to sailing ships.
I know there are probably huge engineering problems preventing this from happening, so feel free to tell me why it's impossible.
Currently, ships need human sailors. They perform maintenance aboard ship as well as have legal oversight of the craft. We are not yet able to replace the crew with automation.
It's difficult to find skilled crewmembers willing to sign up to extremely long rotations away from home.
It just takes money. $100k-$300k/yr is plenty to have your pick of pretty good people, especially if there are any perks like the food being halfway decent (should be basically a given if you have to pay the chef a lot anyway).
That's not even close to true for the kind of large shipping we're talking about. Crews are small (the Ever Given had 25 people on board) but the ships they crew take up to ~100k gallons of fuel per day (Ever Given has a fuel capacity of 3622168.679 gallons, 13711400 liters, and is set up for voyages of ~30 days underway).
Fuel costs are ~$2.5 USD/gallon for bunker fuel. That means a cool $200k per day (conservatively).
It is absolutely not the personnel costs that'd be the big differences in expenses.
Not really. The unit economics work out heavily in favor of wind even with slower trips and absurd wages and the fact that oil has its externalities pushed to other people. Ignoring local manufacturing minima, the reason we don't do more of it is that the capital outlay is important and heavily favors faster trips, much like how excess solar for refinery power isn't often enticing because the factory spends too much time idle. Combine that with manuverability in canals (so you probably need a powerful engine anyway), and the project needs a lot of TLC to make economic sense while oil is subsidized to this degree, but unit costs aren't the culprit, and even wages at that extreme are totally fine.
But, ships need far smaller crews than they did in the past. A tall ship takes a larger crew than a steamship back in the 1980s. (I've crossed the Atlantic both ways.) Today, with automation, we have unattended engine rooms (unattended machinery spaces or UMS). You'll never totally eliminate a crew, for hte reasons you mention; but, we've reduced the size significantly.
> Nuclear ships are currently the responsibility of their own countries, but none are involved in international trade. As a result of this work in 2014 two papers on commercial nuclear marine propulsion were published by Lloyd's Register and the other members of this consortium....
> This is a small fast-neutron reactor using lead–bismuth eutectic cooling and able to operate for ten full-power years before refueling, and in service last for a 25-year operational life of the vessel. They conclude that the concept is feasible, but further maturity of nuclear technology and the development and harmonisation of the regulatory framework would be necessary before the concept would be viable.
> In December 2023, the Jiangnan Shipyard under the China State Shipbuilding Corporation officially released a design of a 24000 TEU-class container ship — known as the KUN-24AP — at Marintec China 2023, a premier maritime industry exhibition held in Shanghai. The container ship is reported to be powered by a thorium-based molten salt reactor, making it a first thorium-powered container ship and, if completed, the largest nuclear-powered container ship in the world.
Nuclear ships are technically possible, but have a massive number of downsides.
- The construction cost would be significantly higher than a conventional ship.
- Reactors are far from trivial, so you'd double or triple the crew required.
- Shipbreaking would become even more of an issue than it already is. You can't just beach a ship like this in Bangladesh and have a bunch of untrained people attack it with plasma cutters.
- The ship would be a huge target for pirates and terrorists. It's essentially a floating dirty bomb, after all, just waiting for the USS Cole treatment.
- A lot of countries would not accept nuclear ships, both due to perceived security risks and for more ideological reasons.
... and that's probably only the tip of the iceberg.
Nuclear is barely economically viable with land-based large-scale nuclear power plants running for 50+ years. They are an attractive option for some military ships, but I doubt anyone would be willing to risk it for regular commercial shipping.
> This source of power confers some advantages. "You will have ships going maybe 50% faster because the fuel is essentially free once you have made the upfront capex investment," Sohmen-Pao said.
You achieve ~0 emissions AND avoid increasing transit time going with pure sailing ships.
We should not under-estimate the need for speed in supply chains. Predicting future demand is hard. To be more specific, we're talking about predicting ~100M unique products (the order of magnitude that moves on the pacific) and some of them have very lumpy demand (e.g. invent a new product, but it depends on 100 other obscure products).
> if supply lines were set up correctly, that wouldn't matter for a lot of cargo.
One of the big problems facing logistics across the board is just optimization. But at some point, you run out of intuition to uncover more efficiencies. This space is actually a really good use for AI. In fact, it's even useful for predicting what to put on that boat ahead of when it's ordered/purchased (up to a point). So yes, longer shipping times might not be that big a deal for non-perishables and frozen products.
Not really. They’re 1.6% of global emissions if I multiplied the numbers on this page out right. The table says they’re 20% of shipping emissions, and the intro says shipping is 8% of global emissions (excluding ports and warehouses).
This result seems surprising until you realize that semi trucks produce 100x more CO2 per kg-mile of cargo.
We probably don’t have the physical space to onshore 6x the capacity in warehouse or whatever it would work out to around ports. Short of multilevel warehouses but I mean containers have been stacked 5 high since covid around the port of LA and I think that is about the limit without some significant rethinking of process. Maybe the ships could just anchor off shore for longer and function as the warehouse.
Because floating solar panels add drag proportional to their area, and it takes a lot of area of panels to power a motor that is sufficient for a cargo ship even without the added drag of the panels. Also, because oceans and the things one runs into in them aren't easy on solar panels being dragged along by cargo ships.
i wish there was more talk about this. it seems i heard a lot about making hydrocarbons from co2 in the air + solar or algae a couple years ago. if your hydrocarbons are made this way it seems they would be carbon neutral.
i'm guessing there's more research to make it feasable since i haven't seen "carbon neutral gas alternative" at the local Chevron.
There has been quite some buzz about ammonia, as it is fairly easy to turn electricity into hydrogen, and hydrogen into ammonia. It has a reasonably high energy density, is not too nasty to handle, and already has a huge industry built around it.
My understanding is that drag is more about the "front-on" view of a craft than how long the craft is.
Since solar panels are very thin and aimed up, it feels like they add minimal cross-sectional area to the craft. Your assertion seems trivially incorrect to me?
Oceans can be extremely rough, but even mild waves make it inappropriate to approximate PV as thin.
The requisite area to power a ship is huge, something like 1.4km^2 (ballpark estimate for 20% cells, reasonable capacity factor guess, 60 MW consumption requirement). If a ship is about 30m wide, it's trailing about 45 km of PV. You're not even into 4 digits of cargo ships before the combined length is longer than the circumference of the planet.
> My understanding is that drag is more about the "front-on" view of a craft than how long the craft is.
Drag (fluid mechanics generally) is... ludicrously complicated. For the typical shapes of ships, I believe you are correct that the main factor is cross sectional area perpendicular to the direction of travel, but that’s not universally true. i think that for a floating raft of panels, it would be proportional to the panel area, similar to how for winged aicraft its the wing area and not the cross section perpendicular to direction of travel.
There's a pressure drag and skin friction drag. Friction drag is supposedly a majority component unless you sail a brick. But I don't have sources to prove that.
Interesting idea, but that would require more than a square kilometer (or a 100m strip 10km long) of solar panels (not accounting for the additional power required to tow the panel array).
Solar power being useful doesn’t require 100% of propulsion to come from solar panels.
You see solar panels added to a wide range of boats because even bunker fuel isn’t free and panels are light for the power they provide over even a few days. A current 399.9 * 61.3m container ship doesn’t need panels everywhere to benefit, but the potential savings is significant if they do.
This is unfortunately not true because of the dynamics of diesel engines: there is by design surplus energy relative to requirements from running them at efficient operating points. Otherwise the ship is not a good ship.
You can always scale design to fit reduced demand. Also, loss of efficiency is more than made up for with vastly lower energy demand.
“Lowering speed reduces fuel consumption because the force of drag imparted by a fluid increases quadratically with increase in speed. Thus traveling twice as fast requires four times as much energy and therefore fuel for a given distance.”
“Container ship Emma Mærsk in Aarhus, 5 September 2006
Mærsk Line's E-class container ships such as the Emma Mærsk can save 4 metric kilotons of fuel oil on a Europe-Singapore voyage by slow steaming.[5] At typical fuel prices of US$600-700 per tonne,[4] this works out to a saving of US$2.4-2.8 million on a typical one-way voyage. Maersk's Triple E-class container ships were designed for slow steaming and have less powerful engines than their predecessors.[5]”
What you seem to be missing is that your understanding is not true because of the practical realities of operating large internal combustion engines.
For example, one tonne of fuel is about 11 MWh. So if you run the calculations, you will see that adding solar panels to a diesel boat, even if the energy they provide is free, essentially never ROIs, and makes the boat less reliable and useful as a boat.
These kinds of engines generate tens of megawatts when they are on, and they are always on when the ship is moving.
One tonne of fuel is more like 5.5 MWh. You did a mathematical calculation while ignoring engine efficiency.
The reality of large internal combustion engines is you still pay for every single kWh. These ships already have extremely complex electrical systems with multiple redundancies and load balancing etc.
The dealbreaker is R&D as unlike a house or sailboat you can’t just yolo where panels are placed and wires run etc, this is all bespoke engineering with few of any give design being manufactured and little available space.
No, one tonne of diesel fuel contains about 11 MWh of potential energy as determined by calorimetric methods. One tonne of fuel when consumed produces a variable amount of useful energy output depending on the efficiency of the engine.
If you said fuel was 5.5 MWh per tonne people would wonder what you cut it with.
The reality of outputting 80MW is that the power to your lights is a rounding error and you’d be better off buying a robot to regularly clean the hull.
> No, one tonne of diesel fuel contains about 11 MWh of potential energy as determined by calorimetric methods. One tonne of fuel when consumed produces a variable amount of useful energy output depending on the efficiency of the engine.
That’s almost correct, good try.
> lights is a rounding error
Ships use electrical power for far more than lighting, and no electricity is not a rounding error compared to profit it’s a significant expense for cargo ships.
I'm not an expert, but I've worked close to some of the engines that power those ships. My gut feeling is that you're vastly underestimating how much power those ships consume (and therefore produce).
this post is a fake argument with no one? the typical internet outrage pattern of using overly dramatized language like "dirty secret" to describe something thats... common knowledge? not a secret at all? openly talked about at any and every relevant industries conferences and trade shows?
everybody who isn't just reading clickbait and comments sections is well aware that the wh/kg for li-ion will never cross the atlantic much less the pacific, via air or sea. thats why the aviation industry went in on SAF/eFuels, thats why the shipping industry is playing with hydrogen and ammonia. everybody knows the litany of challenges there (please spare us yet another internet commenters thoughts on hydrogen), but the very fact that they're trying is in and of itself a clear admission of the understanding that li-ion doesn't get you there.
You don’t need to rant when it’s enough to show that a few dozen airliners consume a day’s worth of a nuclear reactor power production (for some size of an airplane and a nuclear reactor; we should be accurate within an order of magnitude). Imagine every single airport needing its own huge ass power plant and you get your point across in an HN comment.
Not sure what’s the point in attacking physicists, either. They should be the first ones pointing this out and I can’t imagine one not nodding in agreement.
His beef against physicists is likely rooted in confirmation bias. Musk has a BA in physics that some debate if he even completed, but one bad egg does not prove the rule. It would be just as easy to point out engineers who have gone on to lead dodgy enterprises but, again, a few bad eggs do not prove the rule.
His reason for attacking another group is likely to make his own group look superior. This works on the playground and in more professional situations than it really should. He might also just be airing his prejudices thoughtlessly.
Either way, it's probably going to limit the audience he reaches and invite some nasty responses. He'd do well to avoid spewing such nonsense in the future.
but the metric the OP was using was power density. nuke fuels are MUCH more energy dense than hydrocarbon fuels. but putting a reactor on each plane would probably have negative externalities.
but mixing your comment with a few others, maybe a nuke plant on the ground that cracks the co2 in the atmosphere to make carbon neutral hydrocarbon fuel.
> but putting a reactor on each plane would probably have negative externalities.
Probably? It would be a disaster every time one crashes, would carry a huge proliferation and terrorism risk. Oof.
In the 50's some countries were that crazy and they even put reactors in space. Two of which crashed and one contaminated a huge area in Canada. Luckily common sense prevailed and these things don't happen anymore. Though nuclear ships still exist, there's only a few icebreakers in the civilian fleet AFAIK.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought we still use RTGs in space on some satellites? Not counting extraterrestrial research, since those are definitely still powered by RTGs
The ones I speak of had actual reactors with moving parts. Most of them were Soviet, one was American (a research one, the soviet ones were active radar sats with a shelf life of only a few months). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US-A (The soviets called them US-A for some weird reason, lol). There were 33 of them, 3 of which have already crashed to earth.
But yeah RTGs are very nasty stuff too. They are much easier to secure against breaking apart on re-entry though (although dropping a concentrated plutonium source into a random place is not a great idea either obviously).
The profitability will come when we factor in the environmental damage in the prices.
However the elephant in the room at least for aviation is that the energy per kg is about 50 higher for kerosene than for lithium batteries. A very large part of an airliner is fuel already. 50 as much? Not gonna happen. This will remain a really short range thing unless a really amazing breakthrough happens.
One possible path is the hybrid aircraft, where combustion turbines or fuel cells produce electric power that drives small ducted fans via electric motors. The enabling technology here is superconductors. Airbus is working on superconducting motors and generators for such hydrogen-powered aircraft.
One can imagine regenerative braking in the fans, for example to recover energy as aircraft descend, and also with batteries providing emergency backup power.
Indeed and an aircraft never really 'brakes' like a car does, except for 20 second on the ground (including thrust reversers). Even in a descent you would have significant forward thrust. The drag does all the braking. And you can't regenerate that.
PS I'm a hobby pilot so please correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think even an airliner would idle their engines during descent.
I don't see how that can possibly be correct, at least for commercial airliners.
An airliner will use maximum power at takeoff, somewhat less for climbing, and much less during cruise. The figure I see is takeoff fuel consumption/hour is like 3x cruise fuel consumption/hour. Power needed will also decline as fuel is burned off, since the required lift goes down.
Couldn't this just be related to relative engine efficiency? You could easily be running the engines effectively full power the entire time, but obviously high-altitude cruise is where you spend most of your time and presumably the engine's are optimized for that operating regime.
The same thing could have been said years ago about solar power in california.
But with PG&E's regulatory capture and people paying 50c/kwh for electricity, solar is economically practical. Even with batteries! (and wholesale electricity is still 3-4c/kwh)
My point is that the math could change in a moment due to regulation and/or energy repricing.
(example: disallow non-electric planes at certain airports or certain distances; allow in-city electric flight; wholesale electric rate for electric aviation/shipping; etc)
(that said, writer is probably right about this moment in time)
The math would already change quite a bit if airplanes had to play on a level playing field. For example, in the EU there are no taxes on aviation fuel. For a country like Germany that's the equivalent of a yearly 7 billion euro subsidy.
Add fuel taxes and CO2 surcharges, and same-continent rail travel suddenly becomes a lot more attractive!
I can buy these arguments for airplanes. I'm more intrigued by the throwaway tweet claiming "electric scooter companies can never be profitable", because I don't see why this should be the case, unless "scooter" here is referring specifically to Ola style light motorcycles that compete directly with ICE equivalents, and not Lime style electric kick scooters that don't?
This is a really nice article, in that its long and provides a good example of knowing everything yet nothing.
Setting aside individual problems with it, this is because it suffers from a broad and blindingly obvious problem: investment is occurring in this area b/c it will be absolutely politically unpalatable in 20 years to still be emitting CO2.
A long analysis showing lithium is more expensive than just using gas is unnecessary, and not even wrong when its used to prove VCs are dumb or whatever.
Things are going to get that bad. Mark my words. It's like how it was obvious COVID was going to be a pandemic after January 2020. You could derive it from basic #s.
Sulfur Hexafluoride and Nitrogen Trifluoride proliferate under a CO2 minimization regime. Nobody is arguing with Arrhenius proofs.
Nitrogen trifluoride (NF3) is a potent greenhouse gas with a global warming potential (GWP) of 17,200 over a 100-year period, meaning it's 17,200 times more effective than carbon dioxide (CO2) in trapping heat in the atmosphere. This GWP value is used to calculate the CO2 equivalent of NF3 emissions.
What's wrong with CO2? It's not a serious issue, it's just an easy proxy for real environmental damage, focusing on CO2 simplifies complex issues like deforestation, pollution, resource depletion, and actual toxic emissions from the rest of the world. The idea is we're going to implement another tax on the plebs to drive a carbon economy and that will compensate for the damage the elites and 3rd worlders are doing. Then on top of that all the other inherent taxes like lithium batteries, transmission, windmill subsidies, solar recycling, and so on. And of course, this has to be done on the back of the most productive people in society because who else is going to do it.
I don't know how "we collectively de-fossil fuel and some prices may go up who knows, science!" becomes "damage by elites and 3rd worlders" and "tax" becomes "lithium batteries" "transmission" "windmill subsidies" "solar recycling", and given all that, how it's being done on the backs of the most productive in society (is this a fancy way of saying: people who buy things will buy things with batteries?)
If the idea is strictly "What's wrong with CO2"...who said CO2? :)
I appreciate by default any attempt to make a full accounting of the costs involved in energy transmission and storage. Many of these grid & battery costs are abstracted away from consumers and great effort must be made to understand them fully.
That said, have you done a similar analysis involving the costs of removing finite organics from the ground, burning those, and releasing the byproducts into the atmosphere? Even if one is better in the short term we should still be working toward better options.
Current lithium batteries Tesla - 270+Wh/kg, cheap AliBaba - 250+Wh/kg.
Gasoline/jet fuel - 12KWh/kg, with 30% thermodynamic efficiency - 3.6KWh/kg. If one takes into account piston engines weight and their expensive maintenance or how expensive jet engines overall, the electric seems to have a very good niche of short range planes, and for multi-rotor VTOL it is unbeatable.
Factor in complete system requirements—cooling, casings, and safety systems—that 270 Wh/kg battery delivers only 170-180 Wh/kg of usable energy.
Jet fuel still maintains an 18-19× energy density advantage (3.2 kWh/kg vs. 0.17 kWh/kg) at the system level, which explains the fundamental range limitations we're seeing in electric aircraft development.
For VTOL applications specifically, it demands 2.5-3× more energy per mile than conventional flight, electric air taxi prototypes remain limited to 60-80 mile ranges—impressive engineering, but not yet practical for replacing most aviation applications.
I'm sorry, what? That is an absurd assertion. Batteries are incredibly efficient, like 95-99% discharge efficiency for capacity. They're already bad for this use case, exaggerating it just makes you look bad.
I remember seeing loads and loads of analyses like this back in the 2000s on a site called The Oil Drum about why electric cars would never work at scale. (Spoiler: My family has two EVs.) They always assume that the technology will never get better, that industrial economies of scale don't exist and therefore that prices don't decrease with scale, that currently developed reserves of resources like lithium equal total reserves, etc.
I do think it will be a while before electrification of long haul aviation is practical. Aviation -- all of it -- accounts for only 7% of global oil consumption as of 2024. We could cut oil consumption by more than 80% without touching aviation. Most oil is burned in cars and trucks and those can be electrified today, so we should focus our energy on that and on replacing fossil fuels in electricity generation and take the win there.
Related tangent:
The popularity of toxic dogmatic pessimism on the political left is really problematic. It stops people from offering positive, expansive visions of the future. It's one reason the fascists are winning by default. They don't buy this shit, so they tell stories about the future that aren't "and then we all die in a great Malthusian catastrophe, the end." The fascist vision of the future sucks, but it's better than that, so it wins hearts and minds.
Ask yourself: what if our civilization doesn't collapse? Then what? The assumption that it will collapse prevents people from thinking about the future. Malthusianism is a thought stopping cliche.
> They always assume that the technology will never get better, that industrial economies of scale don't exist
The technology hadn't improved not much more than a quarter's worth so far in my lifetime as far as EV is concerned.
Wh/kg figures hasn't changed, even fusion seems closer than solid state batteries, mileage figures for EVs is same 4mi/kWh, battery recycling still hasn't been figured out. They can't even recover Lithium out of Lithium ion batteries. wtf.
Meanwhile, computers had gotten like, up to petaflops per nation to per building to per node. Wireless Internet went from kilobits to gigabits. Everyone wears UNIX or Linux watches.
IMO, optimistic heuristics floating around EV is too shallow. The model just doesn't have enough parameters that it's expecting growth where it should not and vice versa. It just needs way more grounding to be meaningful.
> The technology hadn't improved not much more than a quarter's worth so far in my lifetime as far as EV is concerned.
Average EV range has increased 2.7 fold in the years 2010 to 2021[1] and has continued to increase - by 40% since then. Neary a 4-fold improvement in 15 years.
Charging tech has improved from the initial Level 1 (1kW) and Level 2 (13kW) technology to fast charging (150kW) or 350kW (current fastest commonly available) while BYD is promising 1MW charging soon. A 350 fold increase with more to come.
Prices for EV batteries exceeded $1000 per kWh in 2010, down to $111 per kWh in 2025 - a 90% drop.
Don't dodge the question like that. I said efficiency hasn't improved. You basically said, the car got 2.7 fold bigger.
Consider that Gen1 Nissan Leaf already had 24kWh battery and 200km(125mi) rated range. Today's EV with 100kWh battery packs has at most 500mi - literally zero improvement.
CHAdeMO supported up to 62.5kW since 2009 or so. It can do 400kW now, that's still not even 10x improvement.
Battery cost did marginally decrease. Currency inflated a bit over time. Battery capacity increased accordingly from those. And you spun that into a "350 fold increase".
> Don't dodge the question like that. I said efficiency hasn't improved.
That's not what you said and to avoid confusion, as usual, I provided an exact quote of what you claimed before providing my response.
To repeat, your actual exact words:
> The technology hadn't improved not much more than a quarter's worth so far in my lifetime as far as EV is concerned.
Your attempt to twist away from your original claim while suggesting that I've acted in a shameful manner does not suggest that you're making any attempt to engage honestly or with good faith.
Computers have psyched us out. There is no other technology in human history that has ever seen a capability growth curve like Moore's Law. Even aviation, which went from biplanes to moon landings in 50 years, doesn't compare.
Still, there has been huge improvement in batteries. The main improvement has not been in energy density but in cost. Find some graphs of battery cost per kWh of storage. Storage cost has dropped by almost 10X in the last 15-20 years. Reliability and rapid recharge capability have also increased a lot.
Still, for medium to long haul aviation we probably would need at least a 3-4X improvement in energy density per unit volume and mass, and I don't see that happening soon. It's likely that long range aviation is stuck with liquid fuels for the foreseeable future. But as I said it's only 7% of oil consumption. We should just let aviation keep going as-is and cut fossil fuel use in terrestrial transport and power generation.
Part of why we're not recycling batteries much is that lithium isn't expensive enough to make the investment in it profitable. The major cost in batteries is the manufacturing process, not the lithium itself. If lithium prices go up there'd be an incentive to figure out recycling.
The Oil Drum was converted to a static archive site in 2013, in part because they were finding it hard to attract quality content.
Gee, maybe that was because it was clear Peak Oil (in the we're running out sense) wasn't happening?
This comment was made to the shuttering announcement: "8 years means The Oil Drum came online in 2005, basically matching the start the current plateau in crude oil production."
Global oil production has increased since then. The price of West Texas crude has gone from $100 (which would be $136 in today's dollars) to $64 now.
The left wing pessimism stems from a moralistic view. The underlying idea is that we deserve to suffer, so suffering is predicted.
I didn't mean to imply that the right didn't have its own doomer narratives. The current hotness seems to be demographic predictions of doom, "great replacement" theories, etc. I'm very skeptical of those too.
What I was getting at though was -- I think the left allows its doomer narratives to be intellectually paralyzing. If everything is going to crash and collapse and burn, there's no need to actually try to solve problems or offer a compelling narrative about the future.
The right doesn't do this. They feed their own doomer narratives into a "rage against the dying of the light" narrative. This results in all kinds of ugly racism and persecution and authoritarianism, sure, but it doesn't lead to paralysis. So, as I said, they win by default. In the battle for hearts and minds, they win if they're the only ones that show up.
Edit:
Another way of saying it would be to say that for the left its doomer narratives are demotivating, while the right treats its doomer narratives as motivating.
Sea and air electric travel is and has always been the final frontier of transport electrification, and no one expects it to come easily. As tech currently exists I don't see a path for battery technology to supercede existing fossil-fueld solutions. That could change though if newer, more advanced battery tech comes out but for now it's just not really commercially feasible.
I wouldn't trust a thing this guy says about it though, because he appears to know essentially nothing about the topic he is talking about. I'm glad he includes that tweet at the start because it demonstrates his own lack of knowledge instantly. It's hilarious that he actually is off by a factor of ten :D
lithium is most definitly profitable in thousands of applications including boats, and light aircraft, now.
The intercontinental heavy aircraft, and marine segment is not there yet, but there is a lot of progress bieng made every day, and every single major player in the transpotation sector is watching closely, as the chance of a disruptive battery technology de-stealthing is significant
Aircraft getting lighter as they burn off fuel is a feature. Lithium energy storage doesn’t get lighter as it discharges, meaning the aircraft doesn’t get more efficient as stored energy decreases and the landing weights/speeds are higher than a comparable fossil fueled aircraft.
I’m more hopeful that synthetic jet fuel will be a practical solution than batteries for long-range flight.
> meaning the aircraft doesn’t get more efficient as stored energy decreases
While I read that, I imagined booster packs detaching from airplanes when they reach cruise height. In my mind they look like heavy quadcopters stuck to the wings. They would cycle back to the airport for charging before assisting the next climb.
the thing with all of that obvious engineering detail, is that it is old, very old, and liquid fueled heat engines have very little room for improvement, while, electricity storage mediums, have vast potential for improvement.
Solid state batteries are already bieng investigated for use as structural components, and super capacitors have the potential to weigh very little, and are only waiting for a technology that allows for higher and higher internal surface area, something that many other technologys can make use of, and is bieng sought after by many research teams.
Jet A will remain Jet A, and hot section components in jet engines are more or less stuck where they are ,and the best theoretical improvements, are not large.
So there is a certain inevitability about how this plays out.
Aren’t airlines investing into zero carbon biofuels? Seems like that is not a bad route to go because you use the same paradigm of airliner but the fuel is carbon neutral and not contributing to greenhouse. Although it does continue to affect air quality downwind of the airport.
Your being a bit disingenuous by not comparing the relative efficiencies of electric vs gas propulsion. Electric motors are ~3x as efficient. They also can recharge by capturing energy during use.
In a car for example, you need about 9 gallons of gas in a 33mpg car to get 300 miles. This is equivalent to a 75kWh EV.
On paper though, with the conveniently leaving out details math this guy is using (or maybe it's too physics for him) you only need 2.2 gallons.
The energy required to extract, process and manufacture lithium batteries (70% of total lifecycle energy occurs before the vehicle moves)
Grid transmission losses (5-8% average, up to 15% in extreme conditions)
Battery charging/discharging efficiency losses
The dramatic efficiency reductions in adverse conditions (33% range loss in cold weather)
For aircraft and marine applications specifically (which was my focus), the energy density problem (60x worse than jet fuel) creates cascading inefficiencies as you need more battery weight, which requires more energy to move, which requires more batteries, and so on.
Electric cars have different economics than aircraft/boats and can make more sense in certain contexts. But my analysis was specifically about why lithium propulsion for aircraft and marine vessels faces fundamental economic and physics challenges that can't be solved with current technology.
The tires on an electric vehicle wear down about 20% faster because of the load bearing of the battery weight.
70% of total lifecycle energy occurs before the vehicle moves
that's partially because the operating costs are very low, which is a good thing.
Grid transmission losses
what about the cost of shipping gasoline?
The tires on an electric vehicle[...]
this is part of what leads me to think your entire article is just anti-EV sentiment wrapped in a facade of being about planes, so you can point to the planes when people criticize it. most people here are not arguing that it makes sense to put batteries in planes, they're pointing out the very obvious inaccuracies in basic calculations like the $5/KWh the article leads with. and I also take issue with the un-cited sources (a link to a home page is not a cited source).
Why do lithium battery prices keep going down? Because the Chinese are subsidizing everything for us? Or that battery production is getting more efficient over time? I guess my spidey sense gets a little tingly when sourcing data from papers published in 2021 and 2022. A.) Covid, B.) 4 year old papers are based on data that is even older, and it seems like things are changing fast with respect to batteries. Not to say that battery-electric planes are coming anytime soon.
Why do you say that? Typical fuel consumption values for passenger aircraft are 2.5-4 liters per 100km per passenger. So if you fly 1,000km, you'll use 25-40 liters of fuel. At current prices (around 60 cents per liter), that's $15-25 worth of fuel.
A liter of jet fuel contains 35-38 megajoules of energy, which is around 10 kilowatt-hours. Assuming 5% efficiency of using CO2, water, and cheap solar electricity (3 cents per kwh) to synthesize fuel, the cost of input energy per liter would be around 60 cents, which is the same as current fuel prices. The actual cost would be higher because you need to pay for the plant, workers, consumable catalysts, transporting the fuel to airports, etc. But real world efficiency would likely be higher than 5%. Also solar panels are still getting cheaper and more efficient, so 3 cents per kWh may be considered expensive in a decade.
Even without electric aircraft, there's no reason in principle why aviation needs to be expensive or bad for the environment. If demand for petroleum causes prices to increase enough, synthesized fuels will become economically competitive.
I believe that by 2050 synthetic hydrocarbons made from carbon dioxide and clean electricity will be deliverable at a real (inflation adjusted) cost less than than 3x current oil prices, on an equivalent-energy-content basis. That could more than double the costs of a transatlantic flight, but still wouldn't price it out of reach of the upper middle class.
Synthetic methanol made with renewable energy has already been commercialized on a modest scale:
At 10-15% conversion efficiency, you're burning 85-90% of your energy just making the damn fuel, requiring 6-7× more renewable infrastructure than direct electrification. Current production costs are $15-25/gallon (not the fairy tale $2-3/gallon of jet fuel), and the physics won't magically improve to hit their "3× oil prices by 2050" fantasy. To replace global aviation fuel would demand a staggering 32,000 TWh of new clean energy generation – that's roughly equivalent to building 900 nuclear plants just to make luxury jet fuel while the rest of the grid still burns coal.
You've not actually addressed the cost points he makes. You seem to bediscounting the sheer cost effectiveness of renewable power because if an ideological opposition to it.
The wonderful thing about looking at how much something actually costs is you don't need to do all the work yourself - just look at the expense of the inputs and calculate your output. Solar panel electricity is absurdly cheap.
In any case it's obvious that current direct electrification is not feasible using current battery tech, so alternatives need to be explored. Unless we find a battery tech with 10x energy density batteries aren't likely to be viable in the air.
Just build more nuclear power plants. There’s absolutely no reason why modern civilization still needs to rely so heavily on hydrocarbons. Unlimited electric energy, with a electrified rail network, public transportation and EVs for commuting, should take care of most use cases, except maybe a few where the energy density doesn’t make sense.
And don’t even get me started with the “our grid cannot handle it” nonsense. If it cannot, then make it so that it can. When this country started off, we didn’t say “our roads cannot handle the cars”, instead we built them, quite a lot of them. We can do that again.
Sure, nuclear too. I'm fine with any low-emissions energy source. Electrification can take care of most terrestrial transportation. I still think we'll eventually use synthetic hydrocarbons for long range flights and a few other niche applications like rocket launches.
Actual comprehensive high speed rail networks would reduce the overall carbon footprint of travel by a huge factor, while still permitting a high overall degree of affordable mobility.
I think most of the public would choose the second option. And this is a 500km long trip. Anything longer, and planes win by even larger margin.
If you're talking about the US, there's more about its rail networks density than unwillingness of Americans to build new railroads. It's also because people... don't really like using trains for long-distance transit?
I'm not saying it'll cost the same, I'm saying it'll still be accessible. (Also, comfort level on a train is typically much better.)
And it'll properly price in externalities, which is not currently the case.
Also, just to quibble, I think the _total_ travel time is actually not that different considering you're supposed to get to the airport at least an hour early, and how accessible airports are to population centers relative to train stations.
If you had to catch a cab either two or from the airport, but could avoid it with a train, the costs you cite are suddenly about the same.
Chill, biofuels or gas synthesis will be fine and carbon neutral for big jets. Once solar or fusion produces the primary power cheaply the conversion loss isn't a huge deal.
I think we'll see the global rich (western middle class) continue to fly well past the onset of the famines and refugee waves.
Without a single family detached house and a regular vacation flight most "middle class" people would have no idea why to get up in the morning. Our whole culture is built around lauding and striving toward that pattern as the good life. It will have to be taken from them, they will not give it up willingly.
They may not have been alluding to violence; perhaps something like democracy itself would be enough to take that lifestyle away from the middle class. If billionaires consolidate enough power & resources and push the tax burden onto the middle class which makes yearly vacations unaffordable
People drive to work anyway. A vacation or two every year is probably not even a double digit percent of a person’s total fossil fuel usage, and gives them a lot of happiness and reason to work and do things that are good for society.
Why is there a segment of the population that wants to live in poverty and squalor?
How much pollution is okay? Why not argue for efficiency standards rather than bans?
Everything could be said to “harm people”. Banning travel could make some people depressed and who knows what that could lead to? Or it might lead to a less connected world and less familiarity with people in other places, and maybe makes wars more likely?
Just another indication of why we should have started emphasizing battery electric power, and the chemical research into possible solutions, 50 to 75 years ago when the problem of CO2 altering the atmosphere became scientifically indisputable.
I came to the comments hoping for lots of electric apologists not reading the article and I was not disappointed
As a recap (for those who don't like to read)
- 70% of EV cost comes before the vehicle ever moves and must be recouped over the life of the vehicle (and takes much longer than traditional fuels)
- the energy density & cost of certain fuels is the only reason certain vehicles are able to be profitably operated in the first place
- the only way to create enough energy to match said fuels/demand with electrics (at present) would be to hook up coal or nuclear plants to airports, and even then it'd be expensive as shit
- we basically need a 5x improvement in battery energy density at minimum to even think about profitability, and that's only one of the things that would need to be addressed before it's practically feasible
What do you mean? Virtually no one is arguing that marine or air is viable given current tech.
The article author though demonstrates some clear lack of understanding about more viable tech though, given his absurd assertion about the profitability of EV scooter companies. Ground-based EVs like cars and ebikes are clearly here to stay and are going to replace almost all fossil-fueld based equivalents.
i would have given this guy credit if he compared cost of production for petro fuels when talking about energy debt.
also conflates power with energy, but fine.
if you talk about cost (dollar or kilowatt hour) per joule delivered to a vehicle and then compared the total cost of electric vs. the total cost of petro, i would listen. but he ignored the fact that petro fuels cost money, energy and water to produce.
and there some things electric motors can do that ice can't. an electric ekranoplan isn't too infeasible, but we know from soviet studies you can't keep salt water out of an aspirated motor when you're that close to the water's surface. turns out electric motors can be sealed against water.
and dissing physicists? wtf? makes me think he failed out of an engineering physics degree cause he didn't understand math. as we used to say, the limit of a bs or be as gpa approaches zero is bba.
I directly compared them in visualization 6 ($75-110/kWh conventional vs. $245-380/kWh lithium, all externalities included). Electric ekranoplans would be badass, and sealed motors solve one problem, but battery chemistry is the real beast – we're bumping against molecular bond limitations, not just engineering challenges. Current lithium-ion cathodes are only achieving 25-30% of their theoretical capacity limits, while lithium-sulfur promises 2-3× better density but sacrifices cycle life. Trust me, I want electric propulsion to succeed, but we need fundamental chemical breakthroughs beyond intercalation mechanisms. Got any data on those Soviet experiments? Those Russians were decades ahead on some wild electrochemistry concepts.
Allow me to add a suggestion: how much roads costs? Because one point in eVTOL is in a not so near future ditching roads. Crafting a "light" society who could keep up without roads or at least with much less of them.
Don't have time to reply to everyone. Clearly triggered a lot of programmers here, so I'll try to go point by point.
Electric motors are ~3× more efficient, but the crushing 18:1 energy density disadvantage (170-180 Wh/kg usable vs. 3,200 Wh/kg for jet fuel) creates a physics trap no engineer can escape [1].
A staggering 70.3% of total energy is consumed before the damn thing even moves – manufacturing (35.2%), extraction (19.8%), and processing (15.3%) create an energy debt that makes the whole proposition a joke[2]
Grids: Carbon intensity varies wildly (200-840g CO₂e/kWh), meaning your "clean" electric plane is often dirtier than conventional systems – that's not an opinion, it's EPA data [3].
Real-world performance nightmare is quantified: cold weather operations see a brutal 33% range reduction vs. just 6% for conventional, charging wastes 22.4% operational efficiency, and VTOL applications – which fanboys love to cite – require 2.5-3× more energy per mile than normal flight [4].
We've seen improvements (2.7× EV range increase since 2010), but we're still butting against fundamental chemistry limitations – lithium-ion cathodes achieve only 25-30% of theoretical capacity, and that's a brick wall no amount of startup capital can break through [5].
Synthetic fuels? Give me a break – 10-15% round-trip efficiency means you need 6.7-10× more renewable capacity than direct electrification, basically requiring us to cover half the planet in solar panels [6].
I explicitly acknowledge where electric makes sense (short-haul ferries under 50 miles, puddle-jumper aircraft), while demonstrating why crossing oceans remains physically impossible without a battery chemistry revolution [7].
lithium propulsion systems cost $245-380/kWh delivered vs. $75-110/kWh for conventional systems – that's 3.3× more expensive with no way to close the gap without massive taxpayer subsidies [8].
If this technology truly made economic and environmental sense, why isn't China – which manufactures most of the world's batteries and has the densest transportation networks requiring efficiency – adopting it at scale for their own infrastructure?
They desperately need cleaner air and water, have explicitly prioritized environmental improvements in recent policy, and would recognize a truly superior EROI technology before anyone. Their purchase behavior speaks very loud.
This post seems to either be misinterpreting facts or deliberately skewing them to argue for a specific conclusion. For example, it claims that "According to Gruber et al. (2021), a single ton of lithium extraction guzzles about 500,000 gallons of water." But the source link[1] is an abstract to a different paper titled Oil import portfolio risk and spillover volatility, which has no author named Gruber. So I have no idea if the claim is true or not. What I do know is that lithium is extracted from brine that is pumped out of the ground, then evaporated. It isn't useful for anything else, as it's far too salty for irrigation or drinking. And there are plenty of other ways to get lithium. Brines are just the most economically feasible option right now.
Another claim is, "The International Energy Agency documents that producing battery-grade lithium compounds demands 50-70 kWh of energy input per kilogram." but again, if I follow the link[2], I can't find that information anywhere. Maybe he's deriving the figure from some graph in one of the sections of the report. But assuming it's true, a typical 80kWh battery contains around 10kg of lithium, which would be 500-700kWh of electricity. If we pessimistically assume retail consumer prices, that's $50-100 worth of electricity embodied in the lithium. This is a tiny fraction of the total cost of the battery. It's 5-10 charge cycles out of the >1,000 that is expected of an EV battery.
And both of these claims neglect the fact that lithium in batteries is not destroyed over the life of the battery. It can be recycled once the battery has failed or degraded.
After that he says, "Here's the uncomfortable truth from EPA's eGRID database: the carbon intensity of our electrical grid varies by a factor of 4× depending on where you are." and links to the EPA's Emissions & Generation Resource Integrated Database.[3] Again, the link is to a general site and not the specific information he's referencing. I did find CO2 emissions per megawatt hour in the data explorer.[4] The most carbon-intense subregion I could find in the continental US was SRMW, which corresponds to most of Illinois and Missouri. Its CO2 emissions are 1,238lbs/MWh, which is 562g/kWh. Typical EV efficiency is around 250 watt-hours per mile, but let's assume 300 watt-hours per mile to account for losses in transmission, charging efficiency, etc. In that case, traveling one mile will have used electricity that emitted 168 grams of CO2. Burning a gallon of gasoline emits 8.9kg of CO2, so a gas car would need to get over 52mpg to emit less than 168 grams of CO2 per mile. Again, that's in the most coal-heavy subregion on the EPA map. I don't know where he gets the "carbon break even point" from, as it would require incredibly inefficient EVs or incredibly efficient gas cars.
There's also a claim that 70% of the energy consumption of EVs happens before they ever move. This claim is both misleading and false. To understand why it's misleading, consider a steam powered vehicle. Compared to a gas vehicle, it requires much less energy to construct than to run. But that's because steam powered vehicles are incredibly inefficient and need many times more energy to travel the same distance as a gas vehicle. EVs do require more energy to construct than gas vehicles, but they quickly make up for that by being more efficient to run. Battery production uses approximately 30-35kWh per kWh of battery capacity.[5] So an 80kWh battery will require 2,400-2,800kWh to produce. If the battery is used for 100,000 miles and then thrown away (not recycled so some of the embodied energy can be recovered), then at 300 watt-hours per mile, the battery will have stored and discharged 30,000kWh over its life. Even using these pessimistic assumptions, the battery's embodied energy is less than 10% of the energy used by the vehicle over its lifetime.
In summary, the whole post is poorly reasoned and based on information that is either misinterpreted or nonexistent. If its conclusions are correct about anything, it's by accident.
Just going off the tweet about electric scooters being a scam: Nothing in that tweet is convincing.
Let's just take at face value the assertion that a KWh of energy in an electric scooter costs $5 (as an EV owner: I'm skeptical).
I'm going to use Lime (an SF based scooter rental company, chosen at random) as an example. I tried finding exact battery specs, and couldn't, but based on the range and some general scooter efficiency metrics I found, I doubt it has even a full KWh capacity, but let's round up, and assume that when fully charged, it has $5 worth of electricity in it.
Lime is charging $1.00 to unlock and $0.50/minute of use (somewhat cheaper with the subscription).
The claimed top speed is ~15 mph with a range of 20-30 miles. Let's the take the lower range value there. So assuming that the scooter is doing nothing but driving at it's full top speed for the entire rental period, it would use up the battery in ~1.3 hours. That's a total rental fee of ~$39. Doing nothing but driving it full speed seems like an unlikely use case, so I think this represents a close to worst-case scenario for rental fee paid to electricity used.
Now, I don't know what the rest of the overhead is. So I'm not going to claim that this is an obviously profitable business model, but the electricity costs in this equation are not the reason why it's going to fail.
If the author thinks that this tweet is a slam dunk, I'm not going to bother reading the rest of the article. I too am skeptical of batteries utility in flight especially, but there are probably better sources to get those analyses from.
He is for some reason comparing the levelized cost of energy. This is a metric used to analyze energy generating devices, not energy consuming devices.
His tweet says that if you wanted to buy electricity from an electric scooter and use it to run your house, it would cost the utility providing it $2 to $5/kWh, assuming that the sole function of the scooter is to provide its electricity to consumers directly.
LCOE goes up the further you get from the source, but his analysis is also based on outdated numbers and largely wrong.
That said, he isn’t totally wrong. Electric marine has a tough road ahead of itself due to the inefficiency of boats relative to cars. Boats can be calculated roughly as a car that is always going somewhat uphill.
Electric planes are a niche use case for the foreseeable future.
Electric marine operations seems like it makes more sense if you plan to do something clever with solar panels to generate electricity as you go, rather then try to store it all up front (I don't know what, flexible solar panels on a big parasail maybe?)
Driving it full speed is how you drive these things. They are safer when the speed delta is minimal between you and the rest of the traffic and you are charged by the minute so the incentive is full speed short of obligatory stopping for traffic lights or stops (really blown through) or slight slowing for turns.
Battery estimates fwiw are very optimistic on the app in my experience. Assume error of 1/3 in range to be safe.
> Driving it full speed is how you drive these things
Except for the parts where you have to accelerate and brake because, of course, you're obeying the rules of the road and you are in a city.
Was going to post something similar. I love me a screed where the author rails against some group saying they don't know what they are talking about, and then goes on to demonstrate that they don't know what they are talking about. :-)
For a long time I didn't understand what 'talking past each other' meant but this article is a good example of that. Mostly it's bad form to make sweeping generalizations. But let's be specific;
From the article, here is the "TL;DR" --
Lithium propulsion for aircraft and boats is fundamentally unprofitable across the entire U.S. grid. The numbers don't lie: 60× worse energy density than jet fuel, 3.3× higher operating costs, 22% reduced asset utilization, and payback periods that consume 2/3 of the asset's lifespan. Anyone claiming otherwise is ignoring basic physics or hiding most of the energy and economic costs.
So first let's talk definitions. "profit" is, by definition, "gross revenue" - "costs". "costs" come in two flavors, "direct", "marginal", and "operational". Direct costs are what you pay, every time for the thing you need. Marginal cost is what you pay for just "a bit more" of the thing you need. And operational costs are the costs you pay so that you can operate your business.
So there is a direct cost of a lithium battery which is included in the manufacturing of a widget, there is the marginal cost of charging that battery up to full capacity, and there is the operational cost of maintaining the battery and presumably repairing or replacing it, when it doesn't do what you ask of it any more.
There is a fourth cost, which is "externalities", that covers the cost of remediating the environmental damage which is done by your energy source and while important, and the focus of climate change awareness, its rarely considered in the discussion of 'profitable' vs. 'unprofitable.'
If we keep this discussion on "lithium" which is the "gas" of these transportation modalities. You can say that building a battery pack is much more expensive than building a gas tank. So cost wise a gas is cheaper. The marginal cost of energy in Watts between gasoline and electricity leans heavily in electric's favor for a number of reasons. The operational costs of fueling and maintaining the "source power" for electric cars nominally similar.
But all of that, has to be put into the context of the system cost which includes vehicle fabrication, power 'converters' (aka motors) that turn fuel into motion, and mechanical maintenance.
Then you jump into a bigger frame of reference and consider all transportation modalities and how they combine as a system to get someone from point A to point B, and what are the costs of building, expanding, and operating that?
The author doesn't see a path between 'here' and what they know to 'there' where Lithium batteries have "improved" non-vehicle transportation modalities over what fossil fuels can do. That's fair, I don't see one either precisely, but there are interesting paths to explore. Foreclosing one's thinking to possibilities on those paths is not usually the right thing to do. A better strategy is to think about it in terms of what would have to be true in order for these paths to be viable updates to the way we travel/ship/transport.
"Lithium propulsion for aircraft and boats is fundamentally unprofitable (..)"
It's annoying (and ignorant) author lumps aircraft & boats into 1 category.
Jumbo jets won't be electrified anytime soon. Weight (and thus, energy density/kg) is everything. But synthetic fuels, hydrogen etc might be good options.
But there's also short-haul flights. Routes with say, 15..20min between take-off & landing. For such flights, electric aircraft is entirely feasible. And being done (successfully) in some places. Not to mention eg. training aircraft.
Boats: veeerry different. Weight isn't a biggie, neither is volume. And there's short-haul ferries, long(er)-haul ferries, cruise ships, 10000+ container giants, tug boats, recreational boats that hardly ever leave lakes/canals/rivers, sailboats with engine that's mostly used while entering/leaving port but not out @ sea, etc etc.
Each of these have their own economics. Where they're used and (energy) infrastructure there, is also a factor. Container giant on Asia-Europe route? Good luck electrifying that. Small tourist boat doing 20..30km/day in a natural park? Electric is a no-brainer, today.
And there's existing vessels vs. newly built ones. Most boats get old (like aircraft), more so than cars. Retrofits can be difficult/expensive. But for yet-to-build boats, different story.
Lumping that all in 1 aircraft/boat category, and claiming "uneconomical!" is just dumb.
Clearly the whole article is wasting hundreds if not thousands of peoples time.
> Jumbo jets won't be electrified anytime soon. Weight (and thus, energy density/kg) is everything. But synthetic fuels, hydrogen etc might be good options.
That's making me think that hydrogen-filled airships (Zeppelins/dirigibles) might be practical with some kind of electric propulsion. That way, the weight is no longer so much of an issue, though the trade-off is that they'll need to be bigger. Their speed (or slowness) could be an advantage in that they should be much easier to fly and collisions would hopefully be infrequent and not so catastrophic (I'm picturing more of a bounce than a collision).
In the larger discuss is of course, solar panels, and how they can be installed cheaply enough and with enough storage to make it feasible. Vertical integration is the key here and yes it's additional initial capital outlay, but if someone wants to run the numbers, I bet there's somewhere where it makes sense.
He is wrong on the price of electricity by a factor of 100. The LCOE of solar and Bess is below cost of coal in China already ie around $0.04-0.05/kwh. Recently UAE signed a contract for 1 Gwh 24 hour solar and BESS supply for 10 years at around $6 billion which is approximately $0.07/kwh but after 10 years the solar and batteries will still be working at 85-90% capacity cost 0.
I cant say about planes but as far as ocean freight shipping goes we are very close to the tipping point. Battery prices have already reached a point where it is cheaper to go battery electric for small voyages.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-022-01065-y
A bit later, he claims the lifetime cost of a vehicle is $345/kwh. It’s unclear if that’s capacity (an SUV with a $100kwh battery costs $34.5K new, which is the low end of retail pricing, and actually great news), or energy costs (that SUV will cost $34.5M over its lifetime, assuming 1000 charge cycles), which is clearly off by a factor of >100.
Either way, he concludes the time to payoff of switching to the planes is 2/3rds their expected lifetimes. I didn’t get far enough to find out what that’s versus, but most airlines would happily roll over to a new technology that “only” reduced their fleet costs by 33%.
For comparison, the 737 MAX reduced fuel costs by 14% and is still selling despite all the safety issues.
Edit: My 33% math is a bit off. It assumes the fuel costs dominate. Still, payoff before end of life is still saving money.
“Gasoline’s dirty secret: it’s toxic, expensive and using it kills the planet.”
This type of framing is utterly pointless, and tries to make out like electric propulsion shouldn’t be used for anything because it’s not ideal for everything.
Even if we never get to everyday electric planes (debatable), that has zero bearing on the fact electric cars are already excellent for many uses.
It took my wife and I actually buying an electric car and running it for a few months to actually convince family members that electric cars are a worthwhile technology.
They were fervently against us buying one, so much so that we had to avoid conversation about it and outright lie to them about our intentions.
"You can't take it on a driving holiday."
Yeah, we'll manage with one of our other two existing cars for that, like we have when we've taken one of our previous once every couple of years driving holidays.
"You can't tow with it."
Thank fuck, I hate towing and I can't remember towing anything in the last 15 years.
The electric car, a Nissan Leaf, is perfect for 99% of our use cases. The whole family love it. It's our "first in best dressed" car.
Even smart people are fucking stupid about plenty of things.
His estimate the LCoE of an electric vehicle with lithium batteries is off by a factor of ten. My back-of-the-napkin calculations make it to be $0.22–0.25 per kWh.
Let's compare two vehicles - an EV car vs an ICE car - in terms of their energy costs per mile, including energy storage. Using the above numbers the EV comes out to around $0.07 per mile including the lifetime costs of the battery, and the ICE comes out to around $0.125 per mile.
In short - his numbers are completely wrong and when calculated correctly prove the opposite of what he's trying to say.
> Let's compare two vehicles - an EV car vs an ICE car -
Ok, but TFA is about planes (and boats), not cars. That's a big caveat because neither planes nor boats can do regenerative braking, and planes need to be light. Boats can get big enough to float even if the power plant is heavy, though there is a maximum to what is reasonable.
Another way (from first principles): Assume you buy two cars per driver. The driver parks one car at their solar panels at a time, so one is available for use 100% of the time, and at least one can charge off the panels 100% of the time.
Assume a 10kw solar system with no batteries, but with a level 2 charger. That costs $28K this year. Assume $50K per car. The system cost is $128K.
Assume the climate is such that you can charge the cars at 6kw (max output of the charger) for an average of 8 hours a day (pessimistic in summer, optimistic in winter).
This setup should last about 10 years. (Or sell the cars after 5 and get money back for new cars.)
That’s 365 * 10 * 8h * 6kw usable for the cars, or 175.2MWh, giving us $0.73 per kWh. Clearly the sky is falling. I’m going to get a steam engine for my buggy!
I forgot to figure the depreciation of the cars. We wasted one because this scheme is dumb, so the depreciation for an equivalent ICE car would be zero. For the other car, I think it’s reasonable to assume 90% depreciation. Say the ICE car depreciates $40K. We can sell the two EVs for a total of $10K. Now the total cost (sans car) for the system is $78K, or $0.445 per kwh — cheaper than California’s grid.
I forgot to figure interest on the $78K of capital. At 8% average return, that’s a bit over 2x, getting it closer to a dollar per kwh.
For a 4 mile/kwh car, that’s $0.25/mile. Of course, if you assume the existence of civilization, then the price drops a lot. For instance you could only buy one car, and you could size the solar smaller, or also plug the house into it.
Anyway, in my hypothetical mad maxian hellscape that’s experiencing healthy, steady economic growth and has access to cheap refined gasoline, he’s still off by a factor of 2.5x.
This appears to ignore the new technology that electric brings in: Reduced maintenance, (for aircraft) reduced weight in other parts of an aircraft, new propulsion capabilities that increase efficiency of the energy used, new performance envelopes (like flying much higher because the physics are totally different), etc etc. Sure. Take an existing vehicle optimized for burning things and just swap that small part and things look bad but start optimizing for the new way of doing things and the equation totally changes. Additionally, that 60x claim is getting old by the minute. We are getting to 300+ with advancements coming in so fast they are hard to keep track of. That 60x could drop to 10x or lower in just a few years and that, again, doesn't count the reduction in weight that could come from removing a literal explosion maker from an aircraft can achieve.
There is a cute little two-seater electric airplane used as a trainer.[1] Gets about 50 minutes on a charge. EHang has demonstrated 48 minutes of flight with their flying car (a 16-rotor drone). Expect to see those at the 2028 Olympics, ferrying VIPs around Los Angeles. But energy density is too low for long trips.
[1] https://www.pipistrel-aircraft.com/products/velis-electro/
> reduced weight in other parts of an aircraft
The bigger problem is that the overall weight increases. Rearranging the COG doesn't really matter when most of your energy is spent literally fighting gravity.
This is the first thing that popped up in google when I wanted to compare gravimetric density between gasoline and lithium ion batteries. Gasoline is still approximately 30x denser. That is at least one revolutionary breakthrough in battery technology away, if not several.
https://research-archive.org/index.php/rars/preprint/downloa...
Considering the thermal efficiency of a modern jet engine, the usable energy compared to a lithium battery will be ~15 higher per kg, still bad, but not as bad.
Also some napkin math using common examples gives a range of 0.2 - 1.2 horsepower / kg for gasonline motors, and 8 - 21 horsepower / kg for electric. So even though the batteries weigh more, the motors weigh less.
Doesn't it compound since it costs fuel to carry fuel in a flying machine?
I'm not sure about math but isn't it like 1/15th Isp, even with that maximally optimistic value?
This is not correct for electric trucks. Replacing diesel motor and gearbox with battery pack and electric drive train is close to a zero sum game according to https://youtube.com/@electrictrucker?si=RjdWBQQXansebUyJ
Definitely not a huge penalty.
Fair, but the context here is planes (and boats I guess though that seems less difficult than planes)
Container boats are ridiculously carbon efficient because they move unimaginable amounts of weight (amortizing any fixed costs like keeping the engine running) slowly (low drag) over a perfectly level surface (no loss from going up hill).
Almost any carbon reduction scheme that involves doing anything other than using them doesn’t work.
For instance, the embodied carbon of an apple that goes from China to the US, then is driven to a Walmart in a diesel train / semi is probably lower than the carbon footprint of one from the local farmers market (unless the farmer drives the apples to market in an EV and the local power grid is low carbon).
Right and it's precisely because they can have unimaginable amounts of weight that it's a more tractable thing to solve compared to electric planes.
I don't think the article is debating cargo ship vs car carbon footprint here, it's just the feasibility of electric cargo ship vs bunker fuel cargo ship. (And planes, which seems way harder)
Airplanes don't get to do regenerative braking except briefly upon landing, but you're not going to put generators in the wheels just for that, and you need active thrust reversers, so really there is simply no room for regenerating power in electric planes.
There’s no reason why you couldn’t do regen when descending with an electric-powered prop plane. It would give a steeper descent than normal, and may not be more efficient overall than cutting power earlier and descending more gradually, but it could be done.
Wheeled vehicles have lots of opportunities for braking, but airplanes and boats not so much, so even if you could do regenerative braking (which you probably can't) it'd not be enough to be worth doing. It's a loss compared to wheeled EVs of 30%-50%.
And then airplanes typically need to be lighter when landing than when taking off, and jet fuel has the nice properties that a) as you use it up what you've left weighs less, b) you can toss enough jet fuel to get to landing weight if need be. Batteries have neither of those properties, which means that electric airplanes would have to be built much sturdier (i.e., heavier, therefore more expensive and less efficient) to handle heavy landings, or would have to carry less cargo / fewer passengers per unit of stored energy (i.e., less efficient).
I'm afraid that no matter how good wheeled EVs get, it's going to require a whole new kind of battery before you can ever get to practical. large electric airplanes.
Electric will start smaller and build up to big just like everything else. The single and twin engine world is pretty dominated by structure so the gains are easy to see there. As new capabilities and designs are prooven out things will grow or, and this is what I really hope for, we will find that we don't need the massive aircraft to be profitable anymore and we will just get more smaller electric aircraft providing the service in a more point to point nature. One of the biggest efficiency gains we could have is not forcing people into a hub and spoke mega airport model, something that isn't practical with the current massive aircraft tech.
> One of the biggest efficiency gains we could have is not forcing people into a hub and spoke mega airport model
The airlines have already switched from that model.
That would be terrifying.
The point was the other parts of the plane. No lines moving all that gas around and the pumps and the plumbing in and around the engine and the bleed air piping and the and the and the.... There are a lot of potential places to shave weight when you go electric. An aircraft optimized for electric will be massively different if done right.
The way jetliners scale shaving the weight of those things (and note that you're not counting the weight of electric cables that can carry hundreds of amps) is nothing. It might be something for tiny airplanes, but that's it.
"Additionally, that 60x claim is getting old by the minute. We are getting to 300+ with advancements coming in so fast they are hard to keep track of. That 60x could drop to 10x or lower in just a few years"
What was a Tesla Model S power density 10 years ago? Today? Hardware moves slower than you think. All your points have some basis of consideration but the potential performance improvements they represent are tiny compared to the single huge downside of having to fly a giant, heavy battery everywhere and that is not going to change anytime soon.
Battery density doubled in the last ten years:
https://www.westchestercleanenergy.com/post/lithium-battery-...
Density is going up exponentially in the graph because it has been improving 18% for every doubling of the number shipped. Global EV market share is projected to cross 25% this year, so we should expect two more 18% improvements as it approaches 100%. That should improve density 39%. Then (ignoring batteries sold so far, and assuming there are no new markets for lithium batteries), we’ll see another 18% in 2 years (164% of current density), 4 (193%) 8 (228%), and so on until some theoretical limit is hit.
In all likelihood, some other technology will replace lithium batteries at some point. That further improves the density numbers.
And that's great, lets assume that continues, which there is no guarantee of, when would batteries be in the same ballpark as jet fuel?
Lets call current batteries 300 Wh/kg and jet fuel 12,000 Wh/kg, that means, according to you, development would look something like:
Battery Density: 2035 - 600 Wh/kg 2045 - 1200 Wh/kg 2055 - 2400 Wh/kg 2065 - 4800 Wh/kg 2075 - 9600 Wh/kg
So in half a century we may see batteries approaching the power density needed.
There are physical limits to Moore's-like laws for chip densities and chemical power densities. We can't be too far from those for lithium.
Other than potentially reducing maintenance costs, I'm not sure any other part of this stacks up. I don't see how electrification would allow you to save weight in other parts of the aircraft. I don't think electrification adds any new propulsion capabilities that are more energy efficient, not for airplanes or boats anyway. For boats, the electricity would still be turning a screw and for airplanes the only method of propulsion that would work is an old-fashioned propellor. That last is the same reason you can't fly electric planes in new performance envelopes: prop planes can't get that high and wouldn't work if they somehow found themselves up there. Even turbo-prop planes (which have gas turbines that enable them to work more efficiently at high altitudes) are limited in altitude by the fact that the tips of the propellors are going very nearly the speed of sound.
Storing and producing aviation grade fuel is a considerable expense and logistics chain (unleaded AVgas replacements are still not generally approved - if you live near a small airport you've been getting dusted with lead fumes for decades).
An electric plane dispenses with that: it can functionally be charged up anywhere there's any sort of electric service.
Lithium cannot get much denser in energy storage, sorry. Even 10x denser than jet fuel is still way too heavy.
I suspect that there's niches where battery electric boats and maybe planes do make sense.
My state's ferry system is investing in electrifying, because they project it reduce operating costs. The 'easy' part is moving towards hybrid systems that can move with diesel or battery; this is projected to save fuel even without shore charging. The hard part will be making shore charging work. Our grid is mostly hydro, so switching from diesel to electric should be better for emissions and the operating budget.
If the routes were longer, shore charging wouldn't be very relevant, but they're short enough that many routes could work without diesel most of the time.
Where I live companies are moving to electric ferries because they’re cheaper to operate, require less maintenance, and are much quieter for the passengers. Plus they don’t emit any exhaust fumes while idling at the dock.
The port also has an electric tug boat, which their reports say is very handy because it changes power output much faster than diesel tugs. Charging times are not a factor according to their reports.
Our power grid is 80+% renewable though.
Of course the article ignores that it’s easier to improve the emissions of a few large powerplants than every car, ferry and scooter, and that the minerals in batteries don’t disappear after use.
Also, large power plants are much more efficient than small ICEs. Combined cycle power plants can have a LHV efficiency in excess of 60%.
> the minerals in batteries don’t disappear after use.
For all practical purposes they might, depending on how the batteries are disposed of.
It seems unlikely that the disposal will leave the lithium in a state that’s harder to refine than natural deposits (which are extremely dilute).
An analysis of the Nordic ferry systems ten years ago found that 70% would benefit from electrification —- about 45% could go fully electric, while about 25% made more sense as hybrid.
This means for them 30% didn’t make sense to electrify.
This was Siemens making the case for selling electric boat parts, so presumably this was best case at the time.
We also have electric ferries here in Antwerp and Ostend. I don't think they're hybrid, although it's not clear when they get charged, I would assume during the wait times (about 15 minutes wait and 5 minutes ferrying) but I have not noticed them actually connecting anywhere, maybe I just haven't noticed though. The communication says it can sail for three hours on batteries, so they must charge during the day while operating.
And at my other place around Nantes they're building a new ferry that is supposed to be hybrid electric/hydrogen. I'm not very optimistic on hydrogen though so I don't know. The latest info say the budget has tripled and the delivery has been reported from 2026 to 2030.
Most of them seem to perform opportunity charging (while loading/unloading), using direct rapid charging via pantograph.
See eg https://www.energymonitor.ai/sectors/transport/the-secret-to...
I have also seen designs for ferries to wirelessly charge underwater while docked.
Wireless charging can be quite efficient when the two halves comprise nesting physical features with similar tolerances to actual transformers. But I have not seen this implemented, presumably due to biofouling problems.
Hot swappable batteries!
For the marine uses specifically, the use of hydrofoils promises to dramatically reduce the amount of energy needed for movement at any decent speed.
Previously hydrofoils weren't used because they rely on complex feedback mechanisms to maintain ride height despite waves etc.
Sure, someone could pair hydrofoils with gasoline engines, but I suspect they won't, and that means hydrofoil+electric will win out over conventional hull+hydrocarbon fuels for a bunch of use cases.
Probably not. Hydrofoil boats work OK, but few applications need the speed. The US Navy went through a period of hydrofoil enthusiasm, and built some.[1] Boeing built a hydrofoil ferry, and some are still in service. The Navy version used 10x as much fuel per hour in hydrofoil mode, running off a gas turbine. Of course, it was going fast in that mode.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQ2sSRBMPqs
> few applications need the speed.
Speed is key to profitability for most usecases. If you are transporting people from A to B, and you can do it in half the time, then you can make twice as many trips per day, doubling revenue (or, if there isn't enough demand, you can buy a smaller boat and reduce your capital costs whilst maintaining the same revenue).
And thats before you consider that by going faster you might win more marketshare because the users want the fastest route. And you can often charge extra per person/per ton for faster/express services.
Not in shipping. See "Slow Steaming".[1] Most container ships could go much faster than they normally do.
Sadly, the S.S. United States, the fastest transatlantic liner ever, is about to be disposed of by sinking.[2] 35 knot top speed. Southampton to New York in 3.5 days. No market for that once air travel crossed the Atlantic.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_steaming
[2] https://6abc.com/post/what-are-doing-ss-united-states-histor...
The difference is for short distance passenger transport, I.e. commuting.
A route that used to take 1 hour suddenly becomes 30 minutes and suddenly your daily commute becomes bearable.
Good point. The SF bay has some hydrofoil ferries. Trip length is about right for that.
They use t foil catamarans on the catalina express route. Diesel engines and water jet not gasoline though. Ride is about an hour to avalon from the port of long beach.
I recently read The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson, and one of the ideas in it that I thought was very good was replacing our cargo ships with wind-powered ships, basically giant sailing ships. In the book, they were incredibly slow, with shipments taking months to complete, but if supply lines were set up correctly, that wouldn't matter for a lot of cargo. Cargo ships are a massive CO2 contributor, and it was interesting that a solution could be to return to sailing ships.
I know there are probably huge engineering problems preventing this from happening, so feel free to tell me why it's impossible.
Currently, ships need human sailors. They perform maintenance aboard ship as well as have legal oversight of the craft. We are not yet able to replace the crew with automation.
It's difficult to find skilled crewmembers willing to sign up to extremely long rotations away from home.
It just takes money. $100k-$300k/yr is plenty to have your pick of pretty good people, especially if there are any perks like the food being halfway decent (should be basically a given if you have to pay the chef a lot anyway).
With a fraction of the money, you pay for energy to move faster ...
That's not even close to true for the kind of large shipping we're talking about. Crews are small (the Ever Given had 25 people on board) but the ships they crew take up to ~100k gallons of fuel per day (Ever Given has a fuel capacity of 3622168.679 gallons, 13711400 liters, and is set up for voyages of ~30 days underway).
Fuel costs are ~$2.5 USD/gallon for bunker fuel. That means a cool $200k per day (conservatively).
It is absolutely not the personnel costs that'd be the big differences in expenses.
Good point, I didn't have a handle on the fuel costs.
Backup argument: if you go at half-speed, you'll need twice as many ships for the same throughput.
Not really. The unit economics work out heavily in favor of wind even with slower trips and absurd wages and the fact that oil has its externalities pushed to other people. Ignoring local manufacturing minima, the reason we don't do more of it is that the capital outlay is important and heavily favors faster trips, much like how excess solar for refinery power isn't often enticing because the factory spends too much time idle. Combine that with manuverability in canals (so you probably need a powerful engine anyway), and the project needs a lot of TLC to make economic sense while oil is subsidized to this degree, but unit costs aren't the culprit, and even wages at that extreme are totally fine.
But, ships need far smaller crews than they did in the past. A tall ship takes a larger crew than a steamship back in the 1980s. (I've crossed the Atlantic both ways.) Today, with automation, we have unattended engine rooms (unattended machinery spaces or UMS). You'll never totally eliminate a crew, for hte reasons you mention; but, we've reduced the size significantly.
Or Nuclear Propulsion:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_marine_propulsion#Merc...
> Nuclear ships are currently the responsibility of their own countries, but none are involved in international trade. As a result of this work in 2014 two papers on commercial nuclear marine propulsion were published by Lloyd's Register and the other members of this consortium.... > This is a small fast-neutron reactor using lead–bismuth eutectic cooling and able to operate for ten full-power years before refueling, and in service last for a 25-year operational life of the vessel. They conclude that the concept is feasible, but further maturity of nuclear technology and the development and harmonisation of the regulatory framework would be necessary before the concept would be viable.
> In December 2023, the Jiangnan Shipyard under the China State Shipbuilding Corporation officially released a design of a 24000 TEU-class container ship — known as the KUN-24AP — at Marintec China 2023, a premier maritime industry exhibition held in Shanghai. The container ship is reported to be powered by a thorium-based molten salt reactor, making it a first thorium-powered container ship and, if completed, the largest nuclear-powered container ship in the world.
Nuclear ships are technically possible, but have a massive number of downsides.
- The construction cost would be significantly higher than a conventional ship.
- Reactors are far from trivial, so you'd double or triple the crew required.
- Shipbreaking would become even more of an issue than it already is. You can't just beach a ship like this in Bangladesh and have a bunch of untrained people attack it with plasma cutters.
- The ship would be a huge target for pirates and terrorists. It's essentially a floating dirty bomb, after all, just waiting for the USS Cole treatment.
- A lot of countries would not accept nuclear ships, both due to perceived security risks and for more ideological reasons.
... and that's probably only the tip of the iceberg.
Nuclear is barely economically viable with land-based large-scale nuclear power plants running for 50+ years. They are an attractive option for some military ships, but I doubt anyone would be willing to risk it for regular commercial shipping.
> They are an attractive option for some military ships, but I doubt anyone would be willing to risk it for regular commercial shipping.
There's been a few built over the years, mostly for research.
Russia apparently still operates one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sevmorput
Despite hurtles you've pointed to it is still being considered:
https://www.spglobal.com/commodity-insights/en/news-research...
> This source of power confers some advantages. "You will have ships going maybe 50% faster because the fuel is essentially free once you have made the upfront capex investment," Sohmen-Pao said.
You achieve ~0 emissions AND avoid increasing transit time going with pure sailing ships.
We should not under-estimate the need for speed in supply chains. Predicting future demand is hard. To be more specific, we're talking about predicting ~100M unique products (the order of magnitude that moves on the pacific) and some of them have very lumpy demand (e.g. invent a new product, but it depends on 100 other obscure products).
We should also not over-estimate the need for speed. Just because some items need speed, it does not follow that all items need speed.
> if supply lines were set up correctly, that wouldn't matter for a lot of cargo.
One of the big problems facing logistics across the board is just optimization. But at some point, you run out of intuition to uncover more efficiencies. This space is actually a really good use for AI. In fact, it's even useful for predicting what to put on that boat ahead of when it's ordered/purchased (up to a point). So yes, longer shipping times might not be that big a deal for non-perishables and frozen products.
> Cargo ships are a massive CO2 contributor
Not really. They’re 1.6% of global emissions if I multiplied the numbers on this page out right. The table says they’re 20% of shipping emissions, and the intro says shipping is 8% of global emissions (excluding ports and warehouses).
This result seems surprising until you realize that semi trucks produce 100x more CO2 per kg-mile of cargo.
https://climate.mit.edu/explainers/freight-transportation
We probably don’t have the physical space to onshore 6x the capacity in warehouse or whatever it would work out to around ports. Short of multilevel warehouses but I mean containers have been stacked 5 high since covid around the port of LA and I think that is about the limit without some significant rethinking of process. Maybe the ships could just anchor off shore for longer and function as the warehouse.
There's nothing stopping it, here's a link to an article from 2023: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-66543643
Why can't cargo ships deploy floating solar panels to power the ship motors?
Because floating solar panels add drag proportional to their area, and it takes a lot of area of panels to power a motor that is sufficient for a cargo ship even without the added drag of the panels. Also, because oceans and the things one runs into in them aren't easy on solar panels being dragged along by cargo ships.
Would make more sense to produce chemical from solar energy harvested on the water fuels, collect the fuel and then use this with ships
i wish there was more talk about this. it seems i heard a lot about making hydrocarbons from co2 in the air + solar or algae a couple years ago. if your hydrocarbons are made this way it seems they would be carbon neutral.
i'm guessing there's more research to make it feasable since i haven't seen "carbon neutral gas alternative" at the local Chevron.
There has been quite some buzz about ammonia, as it is fairly easy to turn electricity into hydrogen, and hydrogen into ammonia. It has a reasonably high energy density, is not too nasty to handle, and already has a huge industry built around it.
My understanding is that drag is more about the "front-on" view of a craft than how long the craft is.
Since solar panels are very thin and aimed up, it feels like they add minimal cross-sectional area to the craft. Your assertion seems trivially incorrect to me?
Oceans can be extremely rough, but even mild waves make it inappropriate to approximate PV as thin.
The requisite area to power a ship is huge, something like 1.4km^2 (ballpark estimate for 20% cells, reasonable capacity factor guess, 60 MW consumption requirement). If a ship is about 30m wide, it's trailing about 45 km of PV. You're not even into 4 digits of cargo ships before the combined length is longer than the circumference of the planet.
> My understanding is that drag is more about the "front-on" view of a craft than how long the craft is.
Drag (fluid mechanics generally) is... ludicrously complicated. For the typical shapes of ships, I believe you are correct that the main factor is cross sectional area perpendicular to the direction of travel, but that’s not universally true. i think that for a floating raft of panels, it would be proportional to the panel area, similar to how for winged aicraft its the wing area and not the cross section perpendicular to direction of travel.
There's a pressure drag and skin friction drag. Friction drag is supposedly a majority component unless you sail a brick. But I don't have sources to prove that.
Ships drag across sticky goop, not fly through soup.
Interesting idea, but that would require more than a square kilometer (or a 100m strip 10km long) of solar panels (not accounting for the additional power required to tow the panel array).
Solar power being useful doesn’t require 100% of propulsion to come from solar panels.
You see solar panels added to a wide range of boats because even bunker fuel isn’t free and panels are light for the power they provide over even a few days. A current 399.9 * 61.3m container ship doesn’t need panels everywhere to benefit, but the potential savings is significant if they do.
This is unfortunately not true because of the dynamics of diesel engines: there is by design surplus energy relative to requirements from running them at efficient operating points. Otherwise the ship is not a good ship.
You can always scale design to fit reduced demand. Also, loss of efficiency is more than made up for with vastly lower energy demand.
“Lowering speed reduces fuel consumption because the force of drag imparted by a fluid increases quadratically with increase in speed. Thus traveling twice as fast requires four times as much energy and therefore fuel for a given distance.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_steaming
“Container ship Emma Mærsk in Aarhus, 5 September 2006 Mærsk Line's E-class container ships such as the Emma Mærsk can save 4 metric kilotons of fuel oil on a Europe-Singapore voyage by slow steaming.[5] At typical fuel prices of US$600-700 per tonne,[4] this works out to a saving of US$2.4-2.8 million on a typical one-way voyage. Maersk's Triple E-class container ships were designed for slow steaming and have less powerful engines than their predecessors.[5]”
Sure, but what does this have to do with what I said? You need design and operating margin, and the engine is always running.
Reducing the load is always going to save fuel. There’s no difference between energy used to move a boat and energy used to run the lights.
Put another way if there was excess torque being generated it would go somewhere such as increasing the engine RPM.
What you seem to be missing is that your understanding is not true because of the practical realities of operating large internal combustion engines.
For example, one tonne of fuel is about 11 MWh. So if you run the calculations, you will see that adding solar panels to a diesel boat, even if the energy they provide is free, essentially never ROIs, and makes the boat less reliable and useful as a boat.
These kinds of engines generate tens of megawatts when they are on, and they are always on when the ship is moving.
One tonne of fuel is more like 5.5 MWh. You did a mathematical calculation while ignoring engine efficiency.
The reality of large internal combustion engines is you still pay for every single kWh. These ships already have extremely complex electrical systems with multiple redundancies and load balancing etc.
The dealbreaker is R&D as unlike a house or sailboat you can’t just yolo where panels are placed and wires run etc, this is all bespoke engineering with few of any give design being manufactured and little available space.
No, one tonne of diesel fuel contains about 11 MWh of potential energy as determined by calorimetric methods. One tonne of fuel when consumed produces a variable amount of useful energy output depending on the efficiency of the engine.
If you said fuel was 5.5 MWh per tonne people would wonder what you cut it with.
The reality of outputting 80MW is that the power to your lights is a rounding error and you’d be better off buying a robot to regularly clean the hull.
> No, one tonne of diesel fuel contains about 11 MWh of potential energy as determined by calorimetric methods. One tonne of fuel when consumed produces a variable amount of useful energy output depending on the efficiency of the engine.
That’s almost correct, good try.
> lights is a rounding error
Ships use electrical power for far more than lighting, and no electricity is not a rounding error compared to profit it’s a significant expense for cargo ships.
I'm not an expert, but I've worked close to some of the engines that power those ships. My gut feeling is that you're vastly underestimating how much power those ships consume (and therefore produce).
Economics.
The solar panels would be more expensive than bunker fuel.
Sails would be cheaper.
it might be fun to try to make a modern wooden sailing ship cargo fleet.
maybe with an emergency diesel engine in the back.
It's been done, however the scale of modern Panamax containerships is baffling and most people underestimate their size.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2445620-worlds-largest-...
this post is a fake argument with no one? the typical internet outrage pattern of using overly dramatized language like "dirty secret" to describe something thats... common knowledge? not a secret at all? openly talked about at any and every relevant industries conferences and trade shows?
everybody who isn't just reading clickbait and comments sections is well aware that the wh/kg for li-ion will never cross the atlantic much less the pacific, via air or sea. thats why the aviation industry went in on SAF/eFuels, thats why the shipping industry is playing with hydrogen and ammonia. everybody knows the litany of challenges there (please spare us yet another internet commenters thoughts on hydrogen), but the very fact that they're trying is in and of itself a clear admission of the understanding that li-ion doesn't get you there.
so like, who is this guy even talking to?
Numbers are thrown around without making sure like is compared with like. The central argument is energy density and is supported by handwaving and a broken link to https://www.technologyreview.com/energy which does not exist and likly moved to https://www.technologyreview.com/topic/climate-change/ but that is not even an article but just a section there.
NASA has quietly admitted that aliens have not been found on other planets.
One fact fusion engineers don't want you to know: there's no commercial fusion plant
Babies' "dirty secret": they pee without asking
It's just the usual clickbait crap. I'm with you. Blocking this domain for myself.
You don’t need to rant when it’s enough to show that a few dozen airliners consume a day’s worth of a nuclear reactor power production (for some size of an airplane and a nuclear reactor; we should be accurate within an order of magnitude). Imagine every single airport needing its own huge ass power plant and you get your point across in an HN comment.
Not sure what’s the point in attacking physicists, either. They should be the first ones pointing this out and I can’t imagine one not nodding in agreement.
His beef against physicists is likely rooted in confirmation bias. Musk has a BA in physics that some debate if he even completed, but one bad egg does not prove the rule. It would be just as easy to point out engineers who have gone on to lead dodgy enterprises but, again, a few bad eggs do not prove the rule.
His reason for attacking another group is likely to make his own group look superior. This works on the playground and in more professional situations than it really should. He might also just be airing his prejudices thoughtlessly.
Either way, it's probably going to limit the audience he reaches and invite some nasty responses. He'd do well to avoid spewing such nonsense in the future.
but the metric the OP was using was power density. nuke fuels are MUCH more energy dense than hydrocarbon fuels. but putting a reactor on each plane would probably have negative externalities.
but mixing your comment with a few others, maybe a nuke plant on the ground that cracks the co2 in the atmosphere to make carbon neutral hydrocarbon fuel.
> but putting a reactor on each plane would probably have negative externalities.
Probably? It would be a disaster every time one crashes, would carry a huge proliferation and terrorism risk. Oof.
In the 50's some countries were that crazy and they even put reactors in space. Two of which crashed and one contaminated a huge area in Canada. Luckily common sense prevailed and these things don't happen anymore. Though nuclear ships still exist, there's only a few icebreakers in the civilian fleet AFAIK.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought we still use RTGs in space on some satellites? Not counting extraterrestrial research, since those are definitely still powered by RTGs
The ones I speak of had actual reactors with moving parts. Most of them were Soviet, one was American (a research one, the soviet ones were active radar sats with a shelf life of only a few months). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US-A (The soviets called them US-A for some weird reason, lol). There were 33 of them, 3 of which have already crashed to earth.
But yeah RTGs are very nasty stuff too. They are much easier to secure against breaking apart on re-entry though (although dropping a concentrated plutonium source into a random place is not a great idea either obviously).
I don't think any are used on current earth-orbiting sats though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...
The profitability will come when we factor in the environmental damage in the prices.
However the elephant in the room at least for aviation is that the energy per kg is about 50 higher for kerosene than for lithium batteries. A very large part of an airliner is fuel already. 50 as much? Not gonna happen. This will remain a really short range thing unless a really amazing breakthrough happens.
One possible path is the hybrid aircraft, where combustion turbines or fuel cells produce electric power that drives small ducted fans via electric motors. The enabling technology here is superconductors. Airbus is working on superconducting motors and generators for such hydrogen-powered aircraft.
One can imagine regenerative braking in the fans, for example to recover energy as aircraft descend, and also with batteries providing emergency backup power.
Pilot here, I don’t think this is right.
Aircraft typically operate at 80-100% power output. It’s not the average 20% power output of your car.
Weight is pretty much everything, the savings from regenerative braking in an aircraft are almost 0% but the cost of enabling it is some tons.
This tech makes loads of sense in a car but I’ve never flown an aeroplane in stop-start traffic because that’s not how the sky works.
Indeed and an aircraft never really 'brakes' like a car does, except for 20 second on the ground (including thrust reversers). Even in a descent you would have significant forward thrust. The drag does all the braking. And you can't regenerate that.
PS I'm a hobby pilot so please correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think even an airliner would idle their engines during descent.
I don't see how that can possibly be correct, at least for commercial airliners.
An airliner will use maximum power at takeoff, somewhat less for climbing, and much less during cruise. The figure I see is takeoff fuel consumption/hour is like 3x cruise fuel consumption/hour. Power needed will also decline as fuel is burned off, since the required lift goes down.
Thinner air. Engine is not capable of burning as much fuel, or generating as much thrust, with full performance at cruising altitude.
Ah, that explains it. Thank you.
Couldn't this just be related to relative engine efficiency? You could easily be running the engines effectively full power the entire time, but obviously high-altitude cruise is where you spend most of your time and presumably the engine's are optimized for that operating regime.
The same thing could have been said years ago about solar power in california.
But with PG&E's regulatory capture and people paying 50c/kwh for electricity, solar is economically practical. Even with batteries! (and wholesale electricity is still 3-4c/kwh)
My point is that the math could change in a moment due to regulation and/or energy repricing.
(example: disallow non-electric planes at certain airports or certain distances; allow in-city electric flight; wholesale electric rate for electric aviation/shipping; etc)
(that said, writer is probably right about this moment in time)
The math would already change quite a bit if airplanes had to play on a level playing field. For example, in the EU there are no taxes on aviation fuel. For a country like Germany that's the equivalent of a yearly 7 billion euro subsidy.
Add fuel taxes and CO2 surcharges, and same-continent rail travel suddenly becomes a lot more attractive!
> Electric scooter companies by definition can never be profitable
Lost me right at the start by being proud(?) of this wrong understanding.
I can buy these arguments for airplanes. I'm more intrigued by the throwaway tweet claiming "electric scooter companies can never be profitable", because I don't see why this should be the case, unless "scooter" here is referring specifically to Ola style light motorcycles that compete directly with ICE equivalents, and not Lime style electric kick scooters that don't?
Fair point, check the post again, I've posted on twitter about the benchmark for productively profitable venture and PE dollars.
It's our taxpayer dollars at work.
As a public market pegged to the same grid constraints, I prefer $POWL over most of the private lithium companies being pitched.
This is a really nice article, in that its long and provides a good example of knowing everything yet nothing.
Setting aside individual problems with it, this is because it suffers from a broad and blindingly obvious problem: investment is occurring in this area b/c it will be absolutely politically unpalatable in 20 years to still be emitting CO2.
A long analysis showing lithium is more expensive than just using gas is unnecessary, and not even wrong when its used to prove VCs are dumb or whatever.
Things are going to get that bad. Mark my words. It's like how it was obvious COVID was going to be a pandemic after January 2020. You could derive it from basic #s.
They're not looking to be cheaper-than.
Sulfur Hexafluoride and Nitrogen Trifluoride proliferate under a CO2 minimization regime. Nobody is arguing with Arrhenius proofs.
Nitrogen trifluoride (NF3) is a potent greenhouse gas with a global warming potential (GWP) of 17,200 over a 100-year period, meaning it's 17,200 times more effective than carbon dioxide (CO2) in trapping heat in the atmosphere. This GWP value is used to calculate the CO2 equivalent of NF3 emissions.
Who said CO2?
Who came up with the idea that someones arguing with Arrhenius proofs?
What does our proof showing the existence of other greenhouse gases help us with?
Does any of this shed any light on whether it will be politically palatable to be doing fossil fuels i 20 years?
What's wrong with CO2? It's not a serious issue, it's just an easy proxy for real environmental damage, focusing on CO2 simplifies complex issues like deforestation, pollution, resource depletion, and actual toxic emissions from the rest of the world. The idea is we're going to implement another tax on the plebs to drive a carbon economy and that will compensate for the damage the elites and 3rd worlders are doing. Then on top of that all the other inherent taxes like lithium batteries, transmission, windmill subsidies, solar recycling, and so on. And of course, this has to be done on the back of the most productive people in society because who else is going to do it.
I honestly don't know what's going on here.
I don't know how "we collectively de-fossil fuel and some prices may go up who knows, science!" becomes "damage by elites and 3rd worlders" and "tax" becomes "lithium batteries" "transmission" "windmill subsidies" "solar recycling", and given all that, how it's being done on the backs of the most productive in society (is this a fancy way of saying: people who buy things will buy things with batteries?)
If the idea is strictly "What's wrong with CO2"...who said CO2? :)
I appreciate by default any attempt to make a full accounting of the costs involved in energy transmission and storage. Many of these grid & battery costs are abstracted away from consumers and great effort must be made to understand them fully.
That said, have you done a similar analysis involving the costs of removing finite organics from the ground, burning those, and releasing the byproducts into the atmosphere? Even if one is better in the short term we should still be working toward better options.
Yes.
Current lithium batteries Tesla - 270+Wh/kg, cheap AliBaba - 250+Wh/kg. Gasoline/jet fuel - 12KWh/kg, with 30% thermodynamic efficiency - 3.6KWh/kg. If one takes into account piston engines weight and their expensive maintenance or how expensive jet engines overall, the electric seems to have a very good niche of short range planes, and for multi-rotor VTOL it is unbeatable.
Factor in complete system requirements—cooling, casings, and safety systems—that 270 Wh/kg battery delivers only 170-180 Wh/kg of usable energy.
Jet fuel still maintains an 18-19× energy density advantage (3.2 kWh/kg vs. 0.17 kWh/kg) at the system level, which explains the fundamental range limitations we're seeing in electric aircraft development.
For VTOL applications specifically, it demands 2.5-3× more energy per mile than conventional flight, electric air taxi prototypes remain limited to 60-80 mile ranges—impressive engineering, but not yet practical for replacing most aviation applications.
I'm sorry, what? That is an absurd assertion. Batteries are incredibly efficient, like 95-99% discharge efficiency for capacity. They're already bad for this use case, exaggerating it just makes you look bad.
I remember seeing loads and loads of analyses like this back in the 2000s on a site called The Oil Drum about why electric cars would never work at scale. (Spoiler: My family has two EVs.) They always assume that the technology will never get better, that industrial economies of scale don't exist and therefore that prices don't decrease with scale, that currently developed reserves of resources like lithium equal total reserves, etc.
I do think it will be a while before electrification of long haul aviation is practical. Aviation -- all of it -- accounts for only 7% of global oil consumption as of 2024. We could cut oil consumption by more than 80% without touching aviation. Most oil is burned in cars and trucks and those can be electrified today, so we should focus our energy on that and on replacing fossil fuels in electricity generation and take the win there.
Related tangent:
The popularity of toxic dogmatic pessimism on the political left is really problematic. It stops people from offering positive, expansive visions of the future. It's one reason the fascists are winning by default. They don't buy this shit, so they tell stories about the future that aren't "and then we all die in a great Malthusian catastrophe, the end." The fascist vision of the future sucks, but it's better than that, so it wins hearts and minds.
Ask yourself: what if our civilization doesn't collapse? Then what? The assumption that it will collapse prevents people from thinking about the future. Malthusianism is a thought stopping cliche.
> They always assume that the technology will never get better, that industrial economies of scale don't exist
The technology hadn't improved not much more than a quarter's worth so far in my lifetime as far as EV is concerned.
Wh/kg figures hasn't changed, even fusion seems closer than solid state batteries, mileage figures for EVs is same 4mi/kWh, battery recycling still hasn't been figured out. They can't even recover Lithium out of Lithium ion batteries. wtf.
Meanwhile, computers had gotten like, up to petaflops per nation to per building to per node. Wireless Internet went from kilobits to gigabits. Everyone wears UNIX or Linux watches.
IMO, optimistic heuristics floating around EV is too shallow. The model just doesn't have enough parameters that it's expecting growth where it should not and vice versa. It just needs way more grounding to be meaningful.
> The technology hadn't improved not much more than a quarter's worth so far in my lifetime as far as EV is concerned.
Average EV range has increased 2.7 fold in the years 2010 to 2021[1] and has continued to increase - by 40% since then. Neary a 4-fold improvement in 15 years.
Charging tech has improved from the initial Level 1 (1kW) and Level 2 (13kW) technology to fast charging (150kW) or 350kW (current fastest commonly available) while BYD is promising 1MW charging soon. A 350 fold increase with more to come.
Prices for EV batteries exceeded $1000 per kWh in 2010, down to $111 per kWh in 2025 - a 90% drop.
The technology has improved dramatically.
[1] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/evolution-of-...
> Average EV range has increased 2.7 fold
Don't dodge the question like that. I said efficiency hasn't improved. You basically said, the car got 2.7 fold bigger.
Consider that Gen1 Nissan Leaf already had 24kWh battery and 200km(125mi) rated range. Today's EV with 100kWh battery packs has at most 500mi - literally zero improvement.
CHAdeMO supported up to 62.5kW since 2009 or so. It can do 400kW now, that's still not even 10x improvement.
Battery cost did marginally decrease. Currency inflated a bit over time. Battery capacity increased accordingly from those. And you spun that into a "350 fold increase".
Shame on you.
> Don't dodge the question like that. I said efficiency hasn't improved.
That's not what you said and to avoid confusion, as usual, I provided an exact quote of what you claimed before providing my response.
To repeat, your actual exact words:
> The technology hadn't improved not much more than a quarter's worth so far in my lifetime as far as EV is concerned.
Your attempt to twist away from your original claim while suggesting that I've acted in a shameful manner does not suggest that you're making any attempt to engage honestly or with good faith.
Computers have psyched us out. There is no other technology in human history that has ever seen a capability growth curve like Moore's Law. Even aviation, which went from biplanes to moon landings in 50 years, doesn't compare.
Still, there has been huge improvement in batteries. The main improvement has not been in energy density but in cost. Find some graphs of battery cost per kWh of storage. Storage cost has dropped by almost 10X in the last 15-20 years. Reliability and rapid recharge capability have also increased a lot.
Still, for medium to long haul aviation we probably would need at least a 3-4X improvement in energy density per unit volume and mass, and I don't see that happening soon. It's likely that long range aviation is stuck with liquid fuels for the foreseeable future. But as I said it's only 7% of oil consumption. We should just let aviation keep going as-is and cut fossil fuel use in terrestrial transport and power generation.
Part of why we're not recycling batteries much is that lithium isn't expensive enough to make the investment in it profitable. The major cost in batteries is the manufacturing process, not the lithium itself. If lithium prices go up there'd be an incentive to figure out recycling.
Cost doesn't matter when something is just too darn heavy to be viable aviation fuel. Can't fly rockets on sails just because it's efficient.
> Wh/kg figures hasn't changed
Maybe I misunderstand you, but taken at face value, this assertion is incorrect.
Battery density (Wh/kg) has more than quadrupled since the 90s. See e.g. https://rmi.org/the-rise-of-batteries-in-six-charts-and-not-...
Price is also dropping fast!
The learning rate for Li-ion batteries right now, is around a 35% price reduction for every doubling in installed capacity.
The Oil Drum was converted to a static archive site in 2013, in part because they were finding it hard to attract quality content.
Gee, maybe that was because it was clear Peak Oil (in the we're running out sense) wasn't happening?
This comment was made to the shuttering announcement: "8 years means The Oil Drum came online in 2005, basically matching the start the current plateau in crude oil production."
Global oil production has increased since then. The price of West Texas crude has gone from $100 (which would be $136 in today's dollars) to $64 now.
The left wing pessimism stems from a moralistic view. The underlying idea is that we deserve to suffer, so suffering is predicted.
I didn't mean to imply that the right didn't have its own doomer narratives. The current hotness seems to be demographic predictions of doom, "great replacement" theories, etc. I'm very skeptical of those too.
What I was getting at though was -- I think the left allows its doomer narratives to be intellectually paralyzing. If everything is going to crash and collapse and burn, there's no need to actually try to solve problems or offer a compelling narrative about the future.
The right doesn't do this. They feed their own doomer narratives into a "rage against the dying of the light" narrative. This results in all kinds of ugly racism and persecution and authoritarianism, sure, but it doesn't lead to paralysis. So, as I said, they win by default. In the battle for hearts and minds, they win if they're the only ones that show up.
Edit:
Another way of saying it would be to say that for the left its doomer narratives are demotivating, while the right treats its doomer narratives as motivating.
<2.5% of US vehicles are electric.
I bought $AMR, $FCG, $UAN, and $POWL.
I bought $TSLA and sold almost at the top as well, but for different reasons than fundamentals. (Greenback boomerang CCP dollars etc...)
Chemistry doesn't lie and it imputes all of human behavior.
Pretty classic arguing a point no one makes.
Sea and air electric travel is and has always been the final frontier of transport electrification, and no one expects it to come easily. As tech currently exists I don't see a path for battery technology to supercede existing fossil-fueld solutions. That could change though if newer, more advanced battery tech comes out but for now it's just not really commercially feasible.
I wouldn't trust a thing this guy says about it though, because he appears to know essentially nothing about the topic he is talking about. I'm glad he includes that tweet at the start because it demonstrates his own lack of knowledge instantly. It's hilarious that he actually is off by a factor of ten :D
This is exactly what the CTO at Supernal told me on my first day of work
lithium is most definitly profitable in thousands of applications including boats, and light aircraft, now. The intercontinental heavy aircraft, and marine segment is not there yet, but there is a lot of progress bieng made every day, and every single major player in the transpotation sector is watching closely, as the chance of a disruptive battery technology de-stealthing is significant
Aircraft getting lighter as they burn off fuel is a feature. Lithium energy storage doesn’t get lighter as it discharges, meaning the aircraft doesn’t get more efficient as stored energy decreases and the landing weights/speeds are higher than a comparable fossil fueled aircraft.
I’m more hopeful that synthetic jet fuel will be a practical solution than batteries for long-range flight.
> meaning the aircraft doesn’t get more efficient as stored energy decreases
While I read that, I imagined booster packs detaching from airplanes when they reach cruise height. In my mind they look like heavy quadcopters stuck to the wings. They would cycle back to the airport for charging before assisting the next climb.
the thing with all of that obvious engineering detail, is that it is old, very old, and liquid fueled heat engines have very little room for improvement, while, electricity storage mediums, have vast potential for improvement. Solid state batteries are already bieng investigated for use as structural components, and super capacitors have the potential to weigh very little, and are only waiting for a technology that allows for higher and higher internal surface area, something that many other technologys can make use of, and is bieng sought after by many research teams. Jet A will remain Jet A, and hot section components in jet engines are more or less stuck where they are ,and the best theoretical improvements, are not large. So there is a certain inevitability about how this plays out.
Aren’t airlines investing into zero carbon biofuels? Seems like that is not a bad route to go because you use the same paradigm of airliner but the fuel is carbon neutral and not contributing to greenhouse. Although it does continue to affect air quality downwind of the airport.
But they can do the ground effect pretty well, because the motors become lighter:
https://www.regentcraft.com/news/regent-begins-sea-trials-of...
Your being a bit disingenuous by not comparing the relative efficiencies of electric vs gas propulsion. Electric motors are ~3x as efficient. They also can recharge by capturing energy during use.
In a car for example, you need about 9 gallons of gas in a 33mpg car to get 300 miles. This is equivalent to a 75kWh EV.
On paper though, with the conveniently leaving out details math this guy is using (or maybe it's too physics for him) you only need 2.2 gallons.
System-level efficiency negates motor advantage
https://www.sae.org/publications/technical-papers/content/20...
The energy required to extract, process and manufacture lithium batteries (70% of total lifecycle energy occurs before the vehicle moves) Grid transmission losses (5-8% average, up to 15% in extreme conditions) Battery charging/discharging efficiency losses The dramatic efficiency reductions in adverse conditions (33% range loss in cold weather)
For aircraft and marine applications specifically (which was my focus), the energy density problem (60x worse than jet fuel) creates cascading inefficiencies as you need more battery weight, which requires more energy to move, which requires more batteries, and so on.
Electric cars have different economics than aircraft/boats and can make more sense in certain contexts. But my analysis was specifically about why lithium propulsion for aircraft and marine vessels faces fundamental economic and physics challenges that can't be solved with current technology.
The tires on an electric vehicle wear down about 20% faster because of the load bearing of the battery weight.
70% of total lifecycle energy occurs before the vehicle moves
that's partially because the operating costs are very low, which is a good thing.
Grid transmission losses
what about the cost of shipping gasoline?
The tires on an electric vehicle[...]
this is part of what leads me to think your entire article is just anti-EV sentiment wrapped in a facade of being about planes, so you can point to the planes when people criticize it. most people here are not arguing that it makes sense to put batteries in planes, they're pointing out the very obvious inaccuracies in basic calculations like the $5/KWh the article leads with. and I also take issue with the un-cited sources (a link to a home page is not a cited source).
I agree that planes are not likely to be electrified in the near future with current tech. Not sure about marine though.
Ships benefit from the square/cube law: square the hull area -> the volume is cubed.
E.g. if you double the size of a ship, the drag increases 4x but it can carry 8x the weight.
So larger ships are more efficient than smaller ones (at carrying containers/bulk/etc at scale).
Here in northern Europe, we already have electrified car carrying ferries etc.
Ocean going vessels will take longer though.
Why do lithium battery prices keep going down? Because the Chinese are subsidizing everything for us? Or that battery production is getting more efficient over time? I guess my spidey sense gets a little tingly when sourcing data from papers published in 2021 and 2022. A.) Covid, B.) 4 year old papers are based on data that is even older, and it seems like things are changing fast with respect to batteries. Not to say that battery-electric planes are coming anytime soon.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-lithium-ion-batteri...
If you used floating wind/solar farms as recharging points across the ocean, how much space would they take up?
impractical, the number of ships to install these things is already constrained, not to mention the dispatch, repair, and transmission costs.
Flight is a luxury of the current times that will likely not last another 100 years except for the very rich.
Why do you say that? Typical fuel consumption values for passenger aircraft are 2.5-4 liters per 100km per passenger. So if you fly 1,000km, you'll use 25-40 liters of fuel. At current prices (around 60 cents per liter), that's $15-25 worth of fuel.
A liter of jet fuel contains 35-38 megajoules of energy, which is around 10 kilowatt-hours. Assuming 5% efficiency of using CO2, water, and cheap solar electricity (3 cents per kwh) to synthesize fuel, the cost of input energy per liter would be around 60 cents, which is the same as current fuel prices. The actual cost would be higher because you need to pay for the plant, workers, consumable catalysts, transporting the fuel to airports, etc. But real world efficiency would likely be higher than 5%. Also solar panels are still getting cheaper and more efficient, so 3 cents per kWh may be considered expensive in a decade.
Even without electric aircraft, there's no reason in principle why aviation needs to be expensive or bad for the environment. If demand for petroleum causes prices to increase enough, synthesized fuels will become economically competitive.
I believe that by 2050 synthetic hydrocarbons made from carbon dioxide and clean electricity will be deliverable at a real (inflation adjusted) cost less than than 3x current oil prices, on an equivalent-energy-content basis. That could more than double the costs of a transatlantic flight, but still wouldn't price it out of reach of the upper middle class.
Synthetic methanol made with renewable energy has already been commercialized on a modest scale:
https://carbonrecycling.com/technology
Methanol can be reformed to kerosene as a drop-in replacement for oil derived jet fuel:
"Fischer-Tropsch & Methanol-based Kerosene"
https://aireg.de/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/airegWebinar_FT_...
At 10-15% conversion efficiency, you're burning 85-90% of your energy just making the damn fuel, requiring 6-7× more renewable infrastructure than direct electrification. Current production costs are $15-25/gallon (not the fairy tale $2-3/gallon of jet fuel), and the physics won't magically improve to hit their "3× oil prices by 2050" fantasy. To replace global aviation fuel would demand a staggering 32,000 TWh of new clean energy generation – that's roughly equivalent to building 900 nuclear plants just to make luxury jet fuel while the rest of the grid still burns coal.
You've not actually addressed the cost points he makes. You seem to bediscounting the sheer cost effectiveness of renewable power because if an ideological opposition to it.
The wonderful thing about looking at how much something actually costs is you don't need to do all the work yourself - just look at the expense of the inputs and calculate your output. Solar panel electricity is absurdly cheap.
In any case it's obvious that current direct electrification is not feasible using current battery tech, so alternatives need to be explored. Unless we find a battery tech with 10x energy density batteries aren't likely to be viable in the air.
Just build more nuclear power plants. There’s absolutely no reason why modern civilization still needs to rely so heavily on hydrocarbons. Unlimited electric energy, with a electrified rail network, public transportation and EVs for commuting, should take care of most use cases, except maybe a few where the energy density doesn’t make sense.
And don’t even get me started with the “our grid cannot handle it” nonsense. If it cannot, then make it so that it can. When this country started off, we didn’t say “our roads cannot handle the cars”, instead we built them, quite a lot of them. We can do that again.
Sure, nuclear too. I'm fine with any low-emissions energy source. Electrification can take care of most terrestrial transportation. I still think we'll eventually use synthetic hydrocarbons for long range flights and a few other niche applications like rocket launches.
Actual comprehensive high speed rail networks would reduce the overall carbon footprint of travel by a huge factor, while still permitting a high overall degree of affordable mobility.
A one-way ticket for an Amsterdam - Paris train, taken well in advance (2 months from now), costs $159.30. It's a 3.5 hours long trip.
https://eurorails.com/en/trains/amsterdam-centraal/paris?dat...
A similar one-way ticket for the same date for a flight costs $112 (with no bags), and it takes 1 hour 25 minutes.
https://www.kiwi.com/en/search/results/amsterdam-netherlands... (Yes, some people can say that Kiwi is a shady website, but it can find some good deals if used right.)
I think most of the public would choose the second option. And this is a 500km long trip. Anything longer, and planes win by even larger margin.
If you're talking about the US, there's more about its rail networks density than unwillingness of Americans to build new railroads. It's also because people... don't really like using trains for long-distance transit?
I'm not saying it'll cost the same, I'm saying it'll still be accessible. (Also, comfort level on a train is typically much better.)
And it'll properly price in externalities, which is not currently the case.
Also, just to quibble, I think the _total_ travel time is actually not that different considering you're supposed to get to the airport at least an hour early, and how accessible airports are to population centers relative to train stations.
If you had to catch a cab either two or from the airport, but could avoid it with a train, the costs you cite are suddenly about the same.
HSR infrastructure costs $50-80 million per kilometer in developed countries.
:(
Chill, biofuels or gas synthesis will be fine and carbon neutral for big jets. Once solar or fusion produces the primary power cheaply the conversion loss isn't a huge deal.
I think we'll see the global rich (western middle class) continue to fly well past the onset of the famines and refugee waves.
Without a single family detached house and a regular vacation flight most "middle class" people would have no idea why to get up in the morning. Our whole culture is built around lauding and striving toward that pattern as the good life. It will have to be taken from them, they will not give it up willingly.
> It will have to be taken from them
Be careful when advocating force towards others. Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, after all.
They may not have been alluding to violence; perhaps something like democracy itself would be enough to take that lifestyle away from the middle class. If billionaires consolidate enough power & resources and push the tax burden onto the middle class which makes yearly vacations unaffordable
Perhaps they were referring to economic force. But 'it will have to be taken' isn't a passive statement either way.
Ah yes. George Washington, Simon Bolivar, Vladmir Lenin, etc... famously incompetent.
Incompetence can take many forms. Some of them include starting a fight they can't finish.
I chose those examples specifically because they were completely successful.
Those were; many were not. Someone who takes issue with the middle class of the USA might not be.
you're committed to the username bit
yup
Density is a must have in our civilizations....
How dare you stand in the way of regular people burning hundreds of kilograms of fossil fuel in order to spend a couple days at the beach? /s
People drive to work anyway. A vacation or two every year is probably not even a double digit percent of a person’s total fossil fuel usage, and gives them a lot of happiness and reason to work and do things that are good for society.
Also: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft
It is pollution and it harms people. So in order to do things that are good we must harm others first (or after)?
Why is there a segment of the population that wants to live in poverty and squalor?
How much pollution is okay? Why not argue for efficiency standards rather than bans?
Everything could be said to “harm people”. Banning travel could make some people depressed and who knows what that could lead to? Or it might lead to a less connected world and less familiarity with people in other places, and maybe makes wars more likely?
When Elon and Taylor give up their jets, I will too.
I'm not sure he brings anything new to the argument, well except a disdain for physicists.
fair point, but most people don't open up chemistry books.
I would use the aircraft to ship batteries and win the puzzle.
I'm not so sure about this assessment.
But one thing I would agree with is that Li ion is not the ultimate battery chemistry.
Several others with greater density, increased cycle counts, and more readily available minerals are in development.
Of course there's BYD, which was a battery company before an EV maker:
https://engineerine.com/byd-blade-battery/
And a survey of upcoming chemistries and technologies:
https://thecalculatedchemist.com/blogs/news/the-future-of-en...
Just another indication of why we should have started emphasizing battery electric power, and the chemical research into possible solutions, 50 to 75 years ago when the problem of CO2 altering the atmosphere became scientifically indisputable.
I came to the comments hoping for lots of electric apologists not reading the article and I was not disappointed
As a recap (for those who don't like to read)
- 70% of EV cost comes before the vehicle ever moves and must be recouped over the life of the vehicle (and takes much longer than traditional fuels)
- the energy density & cost of certain fuels is the only reason certain vehicles are able to be profitably operated in the first place
- the only way to create enough energy to match said fuels/demand with electrics (at present) would be to hook up coal or nuclear plants to airports, and even then it'd be expensive as shit
- we basically need a 5x improvement in battery energy density at minimum to even think about profitability, and that's only one of the things that would need to be addressed before it's practically feasible
What do you mean? Virtually no one is arguing that marine or air is viable given current tech.
The article author though demonstrates some clear lack of understanding about more viable tech though, given his absurd assertion about the profitability of EV scooter companies. Ground-based EVs like cars and ebikes are clearly here to stay and are going to replace almost all fossil-fueld based equivalents.
Finance bro decides tweets are better evidence than physics… nothing to see here
former engineer, but w/e.
I found it funny that you felt a need to comment on the “finance bro”-label while simultaneously labeling HN-users as “programmers”:
> I'm getting roasted by programmers, I'll survive.
… often chosen as a sufficiently insulting label to dismiss software engineers.
I may be interpreting your choice of words beyond what is reasonable - as you said: you’ll survive ;)
Only got to the subhead so far but mention of "energy return on investment" suggests this is going to be bullshit.
edit: after reading, it was worse than I expected.
i would have given this guy credit if he compared cost of production for petro fuels when talking about energy debt.
also conflates power with energy, but fine.
if you talk about cost (dollar or kilowatt hour) per joule delivered to a vehicle and then compared the total cost of electric vs. the total cost of petro, i would listen. but he ignored the fact that petro fuels cost money, energy and water to produce.
and there some things electric motors can do that ice can't. an electric ekranoplan isn't too infeasible, but we know from soviet studies you can't keep salt water out of an aspirated motor when you're that close to the water's surface. turns out electric motors can be sealed against water.
and dissing physicists? wtf? makes me think he failed out of an engineering physics degree cause he didn't understand math. as we used to say, the limit of a bs or be as gpa approaches zero is bba.
Full lifecycle comparison included both systems
https://www.journals.elsevier.com/journal-of-transport-econo...
I directly compared them in visualization 6 ($75-110/kWh conventional vs. $245-380/kWh lithium, all externalities included). Electric ekranoplans would be badass, and sealed motors solve one problem, but battery chemistry is the real beast – we're bumping against molecular bond limitations, not just engineering challenges. Current lithium-ion cathodes are only achieving 25-30% of their theoretical capacity limits, while lithium-sulfur promises 2-3× better density but sacrifices cycle life. Trust me, I want electric propulsion to succeed, but we need fundamental chemical breakthroughs beyond intercalation mechanisms. Got any data on those Soviet experiments? Those Russians were decades ahead on some wild electrochemistry concepts.
Allow me to add a suggestion: how much roads costs? Because one point in eVTOL is in a not so near future ditching roads. Crafting a "light" society who could keep up without roads or at least with much less of them.
Don't have time to reply to everyone. Clearly triggered a lot of programmers here, so I'll try to go point by point.
Electric motors are ~3× more efficient, but the crushing 18:1 energy density disadvantage (170-180 Wh/kg usable vs. 3,200 Wh/kg for jet fuel) creates a physics trap no engineer can escape [1].
A staggering 70.3% of total energy is consumed before the damn thing even moves – manufacturing (35.2%), extraction (19.8%), and processing (15.3%) create an energy debt that makes the whole proposition a joke[2]
Grids: Carbon intensity varies wildly (200-840g CO₂e/kWh), meaning your "clean" electric plane is often dirtier than conventional systems – that's not an opinion, it's EPA data [3].
Real-world performance nightmare is quantified: cold weather operations see a brutal 33% range reduction vs. just 6% for conventional, charging wastes 22.4% operational efficiency, and VTOL applications – which fanboys love to cite – require 2.5-3× more energy per mile than normal flight [4].
We've seen improvements (2.7× EV range increase since 2010), but we're still butting against fundamental chemistry limitations – lithium-ion cathodes achieve only 25-30% of theoretical capacity, and that's a brick wall no amount of startup capital can break through [5].
Synthetic fuels? Give me a break – 10-15% round-trip efficiency means you need 6.7-10× more renewable capacity than direct electrification, basically requiring us to cover half the planet in solar panels [6].
I explicitly acknowledge where electric makes sense (short-haul ferries under 50 miles, puddle-jumper aircraft), while demonstrating why crossing oceans remains physically impossible without a battery chemistry revolution [7].
lithium propulsion systems cost $245-380/kWh delivered vs. $75-110/kWh for conventional systems – that's 3.3× more expensive with no way to close the gap without massive taxpayer subsidies [8].
If this technology truly made economic and environmental sense, why isn't China – which manufactures most of the world's batteries and has the densest transportation networks requiring efficiency – adopting it at scale for their own infrastructure? They desperately need cleaner air and water, have explicitly prioritized environmental improvements in recent policy, and would recognize a truly superior EROI technology before anyone. Their purchase behavior speaks very loud.
[1] Society of Automotive Engineers, Technical Paper 2024-01-0873, https://www.sae.org/publications/technical-papers/content/20...
[2] Journal of Industrial Ecology, 24(1), 120-132, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/15309290
[3] EPA eGRID 2023, https://www.epa.gov/egrid
[4] IEEE Transportation Electrification, 10(2), 1582-1593, https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber=668...
[5] Nature Energy, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-022-01060-5
[6] International Energy Agency, "The Role of Critical Minerals in Clean Energy Transitions", https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-critical-minerals-in...
[7] Maritime Economics & Logistics, 26(2), 112-128, https://link.springer.com/journal/41278
[8] Journal of Transport Economics, 58(2), 234-248, https://www.journals.elsevier.com/journal-of-transport-econo...
This post seems to either be misinterpreting facts or deliberately skewing them to argue for a specific conclusion. For example, it claims that "According to Gruber et al. (2021), a single ton of lithium extraction guzzles about 500,000 gallons of water." But the source link[1] is an abstract to a different paper titled Oil import portfolio risk and spillover volatility, which has no author named Gruber. So I have no idea if the claim is true or not. What I do know is that lithium is extracted from brine that is pumped out of the ground, then evaporated. It isn't useful for anything else, as it's far too salty for irrigation or drinking. And there are plenty of other ways to get lithium. Brines are just the most economically feasible option right now.
Another claim is, "The International Energy Agency documents that producing battery-grade lithium compounds demands 50-70 kWh of energy input per kilogram." but again, if I follow the link[2], I can't find that information anywhere. Maybe he's deriving the figure from some graph in one of the sections of the report. But assuming it's true, a typical 80kWh battery contains around 10kg of lithium, which would be 500-700kWh of electricity. If we pessimistically assume retail consumer prices, that's $50-100 worth of electricity embodied in the lithium. This is a tiny fraction of the total cost of the battery. It's 5-10 charge cycles out of the >1,000 that is expected of an EV battery.
And both of these claims neglect the fact that lithium in batteries is not destroyed over the life of the battery. It can be recycled once the battery has failed or degraded.
After that he says, "Here's the uncomfortable truth from EPA's eGRID database: the carbon intensity of our electrical grid varies by a factor of 4× depending on where you are." and links to the EPA's Emissions & Generation Resource Integrated Database.[3] Again, the link is to a general site and not the specific information he's referencing. I did find CO2 emissions per megawatt hour in the data explorer.[4] The most carbon-intense subregion I could find in the continental US was SRMW, which corresponds to most of Illinois and Missouri. Its CO2 emissions are 1,238lbs/MWh, which is 562g/kWh. Typical EV efficiency is around 250 watt-hours per mile, but let's assume 300 watt-hours per mile to account for losses in transmission, charging efficiency, etc. In that case, traveling one mile will have used electricity that emitted 168 grams of CO2. Burning a gallon of gasoline emits 8.9kg of CO2, so a gas car would need to get over 52mpg to emit less than 168 grams of CO2 per mile. Again, that's in the most coal-heavy subregion on the EPA map. I don't know where he gets the "carbon break even point" from, as it would require incredibly inefficient EVs or incredibly efficient gas cars.
There's also a claim that 70% of the energy consumption of EVs happens before they ever move. This claim is both misleading and false. To understand why it's misleading, consider a steam powered vehicle. Compared to a gas vehicle, it requires much less energy to construct than to run. But that's because steam powered vehicles are incredibly inefficient and need many times more energy to travel the same distance as a gas vehicle. EVs do require more energy to construct than gas vehicles, but they quickly make up for that by being more efficient to run. Battery production uses approximately 30-35kWh per kWh of battery capacity.[5] So an 80kWh battery will require 2,400-2,800kWh to produce. If the battery is used for 100,000 miles and then thrown away (not recycled so some of the embodied energy can be recovered), then at 300 watt-hours per mile, the battery will have stored and discharged 30,000kWh over its life. Even using these pessimistic assumptions, the battery's embodied energy is less than 10% of the energy used by the vehicle over its lifetime.
In summary, the whole post is poorly reasoned and based on information that is either misinterpreted or nonexistent. If its conclusions are correct about anything, it's by accident.
1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
2. https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-critical-minerals-in...
3. https://www.epa.gov/egrid
4. https://www.epa.gov/egrid/data-explorer
5. https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3298/12/1/24