I’m more hopeful that synthetic jet fuel will be a practical solution than batteries for long-range flight.
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.
I know there are probably huge engineering problems preventing this from happening, so feel free to tell me why it's impossible.
i'm guessing there's more research to make it feasable since i haven't seen "carbon neutral gas alternative" at the local Chevron.
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?
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.
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.
The solar panels would be more expensive than bunker fuel.
Sails would be cheaper.
maybe with an emergency diesel engine in the back.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2445620-worlds-largest-...
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.
“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]”
It's difficult to find skilled crewmembers willing to sign up to extremely long rotations away from home.
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.
Backup argument: if you go at half-speed, you'll need twice as many ships for the same throughput.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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...
I'm not sure about math but isn't it like 1/15th Isp, even with that maximally optimistic value?
Definitely not a huge penalty.
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).
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)
An electric plane dispenses with that: it can functionally be charged up anywhere there's any sort of electric service.
[1] https://www.pipistrel-aircraft.com/products/velis-electro/
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.
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.
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.
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.
edit: after reading, it was worse than I expected.
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?
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.
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.
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)
Add fuel taxes and CO2 surcharges, and same-continent rail travel suddenly becomes a lot more attractive!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Battery estimates fwiw are very optimistic on the app in my experience. Assume error of 1/3 in range to be safe.
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.
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.
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.
Lost me right at the start by being proud(?) of this wrong understanding.
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 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 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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
For all practical purposes they might, depending on how the batteries are disposed of.
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.
> 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 ;)
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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-...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
https://www.regentcraft.com/news/regent-begins-sea-trials-of...
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.
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? :)
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 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?
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 can imagine regenerative braking in the fans, for example to recover energy as aircraft descend, and also with batteries providing emergency backup power.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
A route that used to take 1 hour suddenly becomes 30 minutes and suddenly your daily commute becomes bearable.
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
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.
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.
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...
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-lithium-ion-batteri...
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
lucidguppy•15h ago
cagenut•15h ago
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.
generalizations•15h ago
Be careful when advocating force towards others. Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, after all.
holtkam2•15h ago
generalizations•14h ago
lukev•15h ago
generalizations•14h ago
lukev•14h ago
generalizations•14h ago
cagenut•12h ago
sadhorse•15h ago
linotype•15h ago
epicureanideal•15h ago
Also: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft
sadhorse•15h ago
epicureanideal•15h ago
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?
lukev•15h ago
AndriyKunitsyn•14h ago
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?
lukev•14h ago
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.
kumarski•13h ago
:(
bpodgursky•15h ago
philipkglass•15h ago
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_...
darth_avocado•14h ago
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.
philipkglass•14h ago
kumarski•13h ago
Panzer04•11h ago
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.
ggreer•14h ago
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.
kumarski•13h ago