Globally, only one in 50 new cars were fully electric in 2020, and one in 14 in the UK. Sounds impressive, but even if all new cars were electric now, it would still take 15-20 years to replace the world’s fossil fuel car fleet.
The emission savings from replacing all those internal combustion engines with zero-carbon alternatives will not feed in fast enough to make the necessary difference in the time we can spare: the next five years. Tackling the climate and air pollution crises requires curbing all motorised transport, particularly private cars, as quickly as possible. Focusing solely on electric vehicles is slowing down the race to zero emissions.
I don’t think electric planes are practical without some serious battery tech to get the weight down. I’m more interested in just reducing use of planes generally. So get high speed rail on land and slow down shipping a little and harness wind power where possible. Most things can take an extra week or so to arrive, and local logistics can use either hydrogen (collected using solar/wind power) or batteries.
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It’s an interesting proof of concept, but like EVs, it’s not going to scale well to larger vehicles. We need significantly better battery tech (e.g. maybe the solid state lithium batteries Toyota and others are working on) to make that a reality.
Hybrid aircraft are certainly interesting though, and I think hybrid in general is the way to go. Electricity is generally better at acceleration (i.e. takeoffs), and fossil fuels have lower weight per unit of energy so they’re better for sustained power (e.g. cruising altitude). I’m a huge fan of hybrid cars, and think they’re way better than EVs for transitioning. You don’t need to give up range, yet you get better fuel economy. However, my understanding is that we’re talking like 5% better fuel economy, not 30-50% as in cars, so it’s going to be a marginal improvement.
Lifting a bunch of heavy stuff into the air is always going to be more costly energy-wise than moving it along land. So we should be focusing on fast ground transportation instead of more efficient air transportation because we already have good solutions for ground transportation (high speed rail, bullet trains, etc) and just need to pay the upfront cost to get it off the ground (ha!). Aviation imo should be limited to things that need to be fast, and rail should be out main form of long distance transportation.
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Maybe? I’m not an aerospace engineer, but everything I’ve read indicates that the weight of the batteries would prevent airplanes from transitioning because it would be too much of a trade-off. Hybrid airplanes seem promising, but I’ve seen numbers from 5% reduced fuel (not meaningful) to 40% or more (seems a bit too optimistic).
Better battery tech is coming (Toyota claims as early as 2027), so maybe that will improve the outlook for electric airplanes.
Even if we had better battery tech today, it would still take years for airplanes to incorporate it properly. So I think we should be building out better rail systems. We have that tech now, and we’ll want it even if we have electric planes.