Whatever Happened Too Harbour Air Electric Plane

[YKA]

Battery powered anything, has a long way to go before it is really a viable mode of transportation. In real world use tesla cars have 40% of the range they claim, as proven by me in winter. In the summer holding it to the floor up a mountain pass put tesla into limp mode because it couldn't handle it. Their joke of a semi truck could not be more pathetic. So why would anyone expect an electric plane to be useful at all. I live a 3.5 hour drive away from Harbor Airs headquarters, and them just trying this lame stunt, has made them a laughing stalk in the area.

 

[David Megginson]

https://airwaysmag.com/industry/innovation/electric-aviation-is-upon-us/

Regarding the reference to "carbon-free flight tech" at the end of the article, sometimes I feel like a few physics courses should be a prerequisite for working in the news business.

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-in-the-us.php

Nothing's absolutely carbon-free, of course, but the subtlety is that the carbon impact depends on where you're getting your electricity from. I tell people that electric cars in China and (to a lesser extent, in the U.S.) really run on coal, because so much of their electricity comes from burning coal. In Quebec (which is mostly hydro-electric) or many western European countries (nuclear supplemented by wind), that's less so, though a good number do also burn Russian natural gas.

Even that's too simplistic, because Ontario and Quebec are wired into the same electricity grid as the northeastern U.S. (hence the great blackout of 2003), so even though Ontario has no coal-powered generating stations—and is usually a net supplier of electricity to the U.S. rather than a consumer—we can't really claim that our electricity doesn't involve coal. These all make complicated news stories, though.

Instead of thinking of electric cars, planes, etc as a way to reduce net carbon emissions now, I think it's more honest to think of them as a prerequisite to reducing carbon emissions when the electricity supply chain gets cleaned up in the future. They're just one step along the path, not the destination. And they do raise other concerns, like higher carbon inputs into their production (which need to be amortised over their lifetime), and the reliance on rare earth and other minerals that are available from only a few countries, not all of them friendly.

 

[David Megginson]

Battery powered anything, has a long way to go before it is really a viable mode of transportation. In real world use tesla cars have 40% of the range they claim, as proven by me in winter. In the summer holding it to the floor up a mountain pass put tesla into limp mode because it couldn't handle it. Their joke of a semi truck could not be more pathetic. So why would anyone expect an electric plane to be useful at all. I live a 3.5 hour drive away from Harbor Airs headquarters, and them just trying this lame stunt, has made them a laughing stalk in the area.

Yes, it has a ways to go. A battery-powered car would be fine for driving around Ottawa, but not for any long road trips. Then again, the earliest automobiles and trucks were pretty useless, too, especially beside the strength and reliability of a horse -- whenever they broke down or got stuck (which was a lot of the time), it would be a team of horses that pulled them free and towed them somewhere for repair. That changed as they matured, to the point that we started using trucks and trailers to transport horses, rather than the other way around. I'm holding off on an electric car until there's at least one more generation of battery tech (and at least a doubling of charging capacity), but then I'll start looking seriously.

 

[Cap'n Jack]

Battery powered anything, has a long way to go before it is really a viable mode of transportation. In real world use tesla cars have 40% of the range they claim, as proven by me in winter. In the summer holding it to the floor up a mountain pass put tesla into limp mode because it couldn't handle it. Their joke of a semi truck could not be more pathetic. So why would anyone expect an electric plane to be useful at all. I live a 3.5 hour drive away from Harbor Airs headquarters, and them just trying this lame stunt, has made them a laughing stalk in the area.

Define viable. for 99% of the driving I do, a plug-in electric car is adequate. The very few times I need to drive a long distance, I can rent a car. While I recognize an electric vehicle doesn't have the range some people need, a blanket statement as highlighted is also incorrect in the context of many people. Kamloops is probably far enough away from anything that you need something more energy dense than current batteries to get to a store to buy stuff. Whistler is probably a different situation, just a short drive from Vancouver, and only a 15 minute flight.

 

[Tantalum]

It's funny, when someone comes here and says "how come my car engine is 1.8 liters and makes as much horsepower as a Cherokee and other than an occasional oil change needs no maintenance and is hassle free?" everyone jumps down their throat "BUT YOU CAN'T COMPARE THE TWO" yada yada yada

But when it comes to electricity it's okay to say "I can drive my Tesla 5 minutes down to CVS and back and that's all the driving I do, why can't we use this with planes? Maybe it can regenerate when you are in descent" <- or something similar to that. Not picking on the post above this, it's just a common thing people do, compare Prius/Volt/Tesla with planes and it makes even less sense than comparing a car's piston engine to a plane's.

A fully gassed PA28 has 300 lbs of fuel on board and will gladly generate 135 hp for a good 4-5 hrs and carry you some 400-500nm. A Tesla battery weighs a WHOPPING 1,200 LBS.. and good luck running it at 75% for 5 hrs straight

..now if someone wants to build some ugly and dumb 1-2 person trainer or local sightseeing plane with a plug in battery fine. But we have a LOOOONG way to go to have Bonanza, Mooney, Cirrus, hell 737 / A320 / 777 type transportation. Why the Harbour Air thing got so much press is beyond me. Anyone with money and a few engineers can put a big electric motor and a batter bank into a plane and say "look at me, an electric plane! Feature me in Wired and give me millions of dollars in funding capital!"

Even if an electric motor is more efficient in creating mechanical energy than some ICE, the battery energy density is a fraction of what it needs to be to any kind of viable contender.

Battery powered anything, has a long way to go before it is really a viable mode of transportation.

Yes! It's just simple science. People keep thinking there'll be a breakthrough but the molecular level physics of how a battery operates puts some of these expected leaps in the realm of science fiction..

 

[Tantalum]

^speaking of, the ICE need not be dead. I was talking to a guy this past weekend at the airport with a DA62.. he'll get 170 KTAS cruise at 13-14 gph (combined).. Those are fantastic figures for a big 7 passenger 5,100 lb twin engine plane. How did they do it? They used a modern engine with FADEC not a 70 year old WW2 era relic for a powerplant

 

[3393RP]

It was just a proof of concept — showing that, in theory, even a 70-year-old floatplane design that originally had a 450 hp radial engine can be adopted to run on electrical power — not a production-stream development.

That's an inaccurate statement. Harbour Air intends to convert their entire fleet of DHC-2s to electric operation.

From the OP's link:

magniX and Harbour Air will now begin the certification and approval process for the propulsion system and the retrofitting of aircraft. Once the certification is complete, the rest of the fleet can be magnified with magniX’s all-electric propulsion technology.

 

[David Megginson]

Even if an electric motor is more efficient in creating mechanical energy than some ICE, the battery energy density is a fraction of what it needs to be to any kind of viable contender.

You're absolutely right, but we need to be careful how we present with those numbers. I'm not an engineer, and may have gotten something wrong, but as I understand, the specific energy of avgas is about 12,000 Wh/kg, while the best, just-being-released batteries right now can manage about 250 Wh/kg. That's a difference of 48× (more with the battery tech most widely-deployed right now).

However, the an internal combustion engine can use only about 25–30% of that energy, so the gap is more like 12× right now rather than 48×. That's a lot, still, but it puts battery tech two doublings ahead of where it would appear to be with a naive comparison. So if capacity doubles twice more over the next decade or two, batteries will be up to about 1/3 of the usable energy/weight of avgas, which still won't do for many aviation applications (like a cross-continent trip with 4 passengers), but opens up a lot more than we can manage now, and certainly isn't science fiction.

I have to say that the potential some day (not soon) to fly around and do that sightseeing you mentioned on $5/hour worth of electricity rather than $50/hour worth of avgas is extremely tempting, as is the idea of not having a lot of expensive and frequently-broken parts to maintain (my plane is down right now waiting for welds in the carb air box and muffler, but there's also the mags, starter, alternator, plugs cylinders, valves, crankshaft, and on and on and on, as we all know from our shop invoices). I assume hourly-prorated battery-replacement cost will be comparable with pro-rated engine-overhaul cost, but we'll have to see about that part.

 

[Cap'n Jack]

It's funny, when someone comes here and says "how come my car engine is 1.8 liters and makes as much horsepower as a Cherokee and other than an occasional oil change needs no maintenance and is hassle free?" everyone jumps down their throat "BUT YOU CAN'T COMPARE THE TWO" yada yada yada

But when it comes to electricity it's okay to say "I can drive my Tesla 5 minutes down to CVS and back and that's all the driving I do, why can't we use this with planes? Maybe it can regenerate when you are in descent" <- or something similar to that. Not picking on the post above this, it's just a common thing people do, compare Prius/Volt/Tesla with planes and it makes even less sense than comparing a car's piston engine to a plane's.

A fully gassed PA28 has 300 lbs of fuel on board and will gladly generate 135 hp for a good 4-5 hrs and carry you some 400-500nm. A Tesla battery weighs a WHOPPING 1,200 LBS.. and good luck running it at 75% for 5 hrs straight

..now if someone wants to build some ugly and dumb 1-2 person trainer or local sightseeing plane with a plug in battery fine. But we have a LOOOONG way to go to have Bonanza, Mooney, Cirrus, hell 737 / A320 / 777 type transportation. Why the Harbour Air thing got so much press is beyond me. Anyone with money and a few engineers can put a big electric motor and a batter bank into a plane and say "look at me, an electric plane! Feature me in Wired and give me millions of dollars in funding capital!"

Even if an electric motor is more efficient in creating mechanical energy than some ICE, the battery energy density is a fraction of what it needs to be to any kind of viable contender.


Yes! It's just simple science. People keep thinking there'll be a breakthrough but the molecular level physics of how a battery operates puts some of these expected leaps in the realm of science fiction..

Not a breakthrough, but continual improvement. A 5-fold improvement in capacity is likely achievable. We might get as much as 10 fold, maybe. There will be changes in battery chemistry to get those improvements.

 

[David Megginson]

That's an inaccurate statement. Harbour Air intends to convert their entire fleet of DHC-2s to electric operation.

From the OP's link:

magniX and Harbour Air will now begin the certification and approval process for the propulsion system and the retrofitting of aircraft. Once the certification is complete, the rest of the fleet can be magnified with magniX’s all-electric propulsion technology.

Yes, they do, but I don't think it will end up the same as that initial proof of concept. Now that they've proven it's possible, they're going to have to do a ground-up redesign to make it practical, so the planes that end up flying (if any) will be very different. For one thing, as much as I love the DHC-2 Beaver, I don't think they'll end up being able to use it with an electric engine for revenue service because it's a heavy steel airframe ruggedised for bush work, and that wastes too much load. With Harbour Air's short runs to the islands near Vancouver, they don't need a lot of endurance, but they do need more useful load, and a purpose-built light composite airframe would buy them a few hundred pounds for the cargoes (mail, freight, and human) that pay the bills.

I do think they can pull this off because of their uncommon operational needs (very short runs, sometimes only a few minutes, to places reachable only by water), but they'll need to bolt those batteries into a lighter airframe.

 

[Salty]

What people that think batteries will continually have massive storage improvements seems to overlook is that there is a very finite amount of power you will ever be able to make with chemistry that doesn’t change the mass. You only have so many electrons to work with. You’re looking for a massive breakthrough in physics, not a progressive improvement in chemistry.

 

[David Megginson]

What people that think batteries will continually have massive storage improvements seems to overlook is that there is a very finite amount of power you will ever be able to make with chemistry that doesn’t change the mass. You only have so many electrons to work with. You’re looking for a massive breakthrough in physics, not a progressive improvement in chemistry.

According to Robert Huggins in Advanced Batteries, the absolute theoretical limit on specific energy in a battery is 1166.4 Wh/kg. That's about 4–5 times what we're getting now in the best lithium-ion batteries, and about ⅓ of the energy that an internal-combustion engine is practically able to extract from avgas (for the same weight).

So no, battery tech alone will never get us to the point that I can fly my PA-28 6 hours (to empty tanks) with 288 lb of batteries the same as I can with 288 lb of avgas. There will be some optimisations (e.g. much-lighter engine and mount than with an ICE, energy recovery from a windmilling prop during descent, lighter airframes, and maybe even solar panels on wings to stretch out the range a tiny bit more), but I can't see an electric-powered aircraft making it quite to ½ of the load/range of an avgas-powered aircraft at the same airspeed, even in the absolute ideal case.

 

[Dan Thomas]

However, the an internal combustion engine can use only about 25–30% of that energy, so the gap is more like 12× right now rather than 48×. That's a lot, still, but it puts battery tech two doublings ahead of where it would appear to be with a naive comparison. So if capacity doubles twice more over the next decade or two, batteries will be up to about 1/3 of the usable energy/weight of avgas, which still won't do for many aviation applications (like a cross-continent trip with 4 passengers), but opens up a lot more than we can manage now, and certainly isn't science fiction.

The 250 Wh/kg of the batteries won't turn into anywhere near 100% useable power either. Everything from the batteries to the controllers to the cables to the motors heats up and causes energy losses. The losses won't be as bad as with the ICE but they're still there, and they add up. If you want cabin heat you'll have to use battery power. Pressurization and air conditioning would really suck the power. Then there's the usual lighting, instrumentation and radios, too.

 

[David Megginson]

The 250 Wh/kg of the batteries won't turn into anywhere near 100% useable power either. Everything from the batteries to the controllers to the cables to the motors heats up and causes energy losses. The losses won't be as bad as with the ICE but they're still there, and they add up. If you want cabin heat you'll have to use battery power. Pressurization and air conditioning would really suck the power. Then there's the usual lighting, instrumentation and radios, too.

Fair enough, but it's a relatively-small loss -- not 70–75% like with an internal-combustion engine (which wastes the vast majority of the energy in avgas as heat). Modern avionics draw little enough power that a typical airplane battery today can run them for 30–60 min (at least), so that's negligible with the amount of power we're talking about. Agreed about cabin heat: there's no efficient way to do that (other than lots of windows when the sun's shining), so pilots would have to layer up in winter.

 

[David Megginson]

The tl;dr is that I don't expect batteries ever to come close to avgas for efficiency, but if they can achieve 4× their current specific density for energy, that would be enough to make them interesting for me. Most of my flights are under 3 hours, and I'm usually a few hundred pounds under gross, so I'd be getting into the realm of usefulness for my flying, and saving thousands a year in flying costs and maintenance will seem pretty sweet when I'm retired and on a fixed income.

 

[3393RP]

The tl;dr is that I don't expect batteries ever to come close to avgas for efficiency, but if they can achieve 4× their current specific density for energy, that would be enough to make them interesting for me. Most of my flights are under 3 hours, and I'm usually a few hundred pounds under gross, so I'd be getting into the realm of usefulness for my flying, and saving thousands a year in flying costs and maintenance will seem pretty sweet when I'm retired and on a fixed income.

Will that fixed income allow you to purchase an electric airplane that will cost several hundred thousand dollars, and a hangar with a 240 volt 200 amp electrical service for the charger?

Heating the airplane cabin won't be an issue, the battery cooling system will provide that.

 

[Cap'n Jack]

What people that think batteries will continually have massive storage improvements seems to overlook is that there is a very finite amount of power you will ever be able to make with chemistry that doesn’t change the mass. You only have so many electrons to work with. You’re looking for a massive breakthrough in physics, not a progressive improvement in chemistry.

Yep, but you can use those electrons more efficiently. Look at earlier posts in this thread. The limitations isn't the number of electrons as yet.

The ultrahigh theoretical energy density up to 2600 Wh kg–1 and the advantages of cathode material including low cost, Earth abundance, and environmental friendliness together endow Li–S batteries as a viable scheme to realize energy density beyond 500 Wh kg–1

(see ref 1).

We are still only using Group I elements (hydrogen, lithium). I've read of some interesting work with calcium [1], which can easily give up two electrons. They are nowhere near ready, but recall the history for lithium ion batteries- people started working on them in the 1970's but the first commercial lithium ion battery was sold by Sony in 1991, a span of more than 10 years.

Will we get there? I don't know. It takes a while. Someone needs to think of the idea, then test it- find out why it didn't work the first time, fix it, then make it work better. Then they need to make sure they can do it again. Them make sure it can stand the number of discharge/recharge cycles to make it practical. Then they need to convince someone to invest money, and the testing cycle begins anew. I've been through this on a simpler scale, for something much simpler than a battery.

[1] https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acscentsci.0c00449
[2] https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.chemrev.9b00339

 

[Cap'n Jack]

The tl;dr is that I don't expect batteries ever to come close to avgas for efficiency, but if they can achieve 4× their current specific density for energy, that would be enough to make them interesting for me. Most of my flights are under 3 hours, and I'm usually a few hundred pounds under gross, so I'd be getting into the realm of usefulness for my flying, and saving thousands a year in flying costs and maintenance will seem pretty sweet when I'm retired and on a fixed income.

See post #57 above.

 

[Cap'n Jack]

Will that fixed income allow you to purchase an electric airplane that will cost several hundred thousand dollars, and a hangar with a 240 volt 200 amp electrical service for the charger?

Heating the airplane cabin won't be an issue, the battery cooling system will provide that.

Maybe not a new plane. But used LSAs are becoming affordable. The supermarket parking lot near work has a bunch of fast chargers. I don't see the problem of putting them elsewhere.

It will easily be years before electric planes are practical. No one is going to take your ICE away

 

[David Megginson]

Will that fixed income allow you to purchase an electric airplane that will cost several hundred thousand dollars, and a hangar with a 240 volt 200 amp electrical service for the charger?

Heating the airplane cabin won't be an issue, the battery cooling system will provide that.

We'll see. An advanced ultralight may do for me by then, so maybe $150K new, and I'll get close to half of that by selling my existing plane, and maybe take a partner for the other half. No need for a hangar, and an electric plane (like an electric car) will charge fine from a regular 120v outlet, like the one I already have in my spot to plug my Tanis heater into in the winter.

Why the hostility towards electric planes and cars? I agree they're often (way) overhyped, but it doesn't mean they're useless for anything, and it doesn't have to become a political-identity issue. This is a pilot forum, so let's have a balanced conversation about the future of electric aircraft (benefits and limitations), and leave political point-scoring for Twitter.

 

[YKA]

Define viable. for 99% of the driving I do, a plug-in electric car is adequate. The very few times I need to drive a long distance, I can rent a car. While I recognize an electric vehicle doesn't have the range some people need, a blanket statement as highlighted is also incorrect in the context of many people. Kamloops is probably far enough away from anything that you need something more energy dense than current batteries to get to a store to buy stuff. Whistler is probably a different situation, just a short drive from Vancouver, and only a 15 minute flight.

If a vehicle cannot tow 3500 lbs, at least 600 miles, in winter, in mountainous terrain, it is useless to me. My 4x4 jeep takes 5 minutes to gas up halfway there, and i go past at least 100 gas stations along that route. Below zero temps, in snow, towing, hill climbs for miles at a time, are no place for electric vehicles.

 

[3393RP]

No need for a hangar, and an electric plane (like an electric car) will charge fine from a regular 120v outlet, like the one I already have in my spot to plug my Tanis heater into in the winter.

You're assuming the electric airplane will have the same size battery as an electric car. It won't. I suppose if you make just one flight and then wait several days to make another the small charger would work.

 

[YKA]

The battery should get you all the way to the scene of the crash...

 

[David Megginson]

You're assuming the electric airplane will have the same size battery as an electric car. It won't. I suppose if you make just one flight and then wait several days to make another the small charger would work.

I'm assuming a much smaller battery than the Tesla's 1,200 lb, but maybe the same charge capacity, in the most-optimistic future scenario. So let's say an hour to recharge with a 240v charger, or overnight with 120v.

 

[David Megginson]

If a vehicle cannot tow 3500 lbs, at least 600 miles, in winter, in mountainous terrain, it is useless to me. My 4x4 jeep takes 5 minutes to gas up halfway there, and i go past at least 100 gas stations along that route. Below zero temps, in snow, towing, hill climbs for miles at a time, are no place for electric vehicles.

Agreed, your requirements sound like a non-application for an electric vehicle, at least with existing battery technology (and I'll spend all day agreeing with you that Tesla and Elon Musk are overrated). But many/most of us aren't regularly driving 600 mile trips in the mountains in winter towing 2 tons.

For me, 200 miles in the low hills of the Canadian Shield towing nothing covers all but a couple of my trips every year. That's at the edge of the capability of current electric vehicles (which is why I don't have one yet), but might be comfortably in the middle for the next gen. If that's so, then on the very rare occasions I need to travel further, I could just rent a non-electric car, or (if my destination's in the Windsor-Quebec corridor) sit back and let Via Rail do the driving.

We're never going to get every vehicle off combustion, but maybe we could get personal land vehicles to 50:50 ICE/electric passenger-miles travelled. That won't please the zealots on either side, but it would make a huge reduction in carbon output—depending, of course, on how we generate that electricity—while still leaving the ICE option for those who need it, including drivers who (like you) need to tow heavy loads for 1,000 km daily legs in the mountains.

 

[GRG55]

The tl;dr is that I don't expect batteries ever to come close to avgas for efficiency, but if they can achieve 4× their current specific density for energy, that would be enough to make them interesting for me. Most of my flights are under 3 hours, and I'm usually a few hundred pounds under gross, so I'd be getting into the realm of usefulness for my flying, and saving thousands a year in flying costs and maintenance will seem pretty sweet when I'm retired and on a fixed income.

You're assuming the electric airplane will have the same size battery as an electric car. It won't. I suppose if you make just one flight and then wait several days to make another the small charger would work.

Battery powered anything, has a long way to go before it is really a viable mode of transportation. In real world use tesla cars have 40% of the range they claim, as proven by me in winter. In the summer holding it to the floor up a mountain pass put tesla into limp mode because it couldn't handle it. Their joke of a semi truck could not be more pathetic. So why would anyone expect an electric plane to be useful at all. I live a 3.5 hour drive away from Harbor Airs headquarters, and them just trying this lame stunt, has made them a laughing stalk in the area.

So far, over decades, the most successsful applications for alternate energy vehicles have been "return-to-base" installations. These are comparatively predictable route/distance/time applications where the vehicle returns to its starting point depot at the end of the route/shift/day to be re-fuelled at a purpose built facility.

That applies equally to commercial fleets of CNG powered garbage trucks, taxis and school buses, LNG powered mine haul trucks, battery-electric parcel delivery vans and so forth.

The daily commute to work and back is a similar return-to-base application that can be done quite successfully for many urban private vehicle owners using current generation CNG or battery-electric cars with the range available now.

That's why I think the first adopters of electric airplanes will be pilot training schools and short-haul commuter airlines/charters (such as Harbour Air), both of which fit the out & back, return-to-base application. It's coming!

 

[wayne]

Silly people.
The power industry is not going to allow high density, low cost power solutions (batteries, super capacitors, or anything else.) Because by Law, they are guaranteed a profit, and their profit comes WAY before your needs and welfare.

Most methods of generating electricity are rather difficult to throttle quickly. Nuclear and fossil-fuel plants welcome the opportunity to even-out load by charging stuff at night.

^This.

Power companies would love to flatten the demand curve. If homes would get batteries and charge at night and then use that for day time loads they would love it. You provide the capital and maintenance of the energy storage that way too. It's a double win for the power companies.

 

[David Megginson]

^This.

Power companies would love to flatten the demand curve. If homes would get batteries and charge at night and then use that for day time loads they would love it. You provide the capital and maintenance of the energy storage that way too. It's a double win for the power companies.

Absolutely. That beats some of the solutions they're using now, like pumping water uphill with some of that excess electricity at night, so that they can let it run downhill through turbines at peak times. It's extremely inefficient, but it at least recaptures some of the energy that would otherwise be wasted. Tens or hundreds of millions of cars charging overnight using that (otherwise mostly wasted) capacity—and then unplugging in the morning—would be a huge business benefit to power companies.

 

[Cap'n Jack]

You're assuming the electric airplane will have the same size battery as an electric car. It won't. I suppose if you make just one flight and then wait several days to make another the small charger would work.

I'm not assuming anything about the battery other than it will be better than the ones we have now. I also said nothing about the charger.

I've noticed China has lots of electric vehicles. I only saw one gasoline powered motorcycle when I was there on Nov/Dec 2019. They have lots of electric cars and trucks. Somehow, they make it work, at least in the big cities.

 

[Cap'n Jack]

If a vehicle cannot tow 3500 lbs, at least 600 miles, in winter, in mountainous terrain, it is useless to me. My 4x4 jeep takes 5 minutes to gas up halfway there, and i go past at least 100 gas stations along that route. Below zero temps, in snow, towing, hill climbs for miles at a time, are no place for electric vehicles.

And again, that's your situation. That's not most people even in Canada, much less the USA. Most people don't drive far nor carry much load. No one is telling you you need to give up whatever you are driving.

 

[Salty]

Absolutely. That beats some of the solutions they're using now, like pumping water uphill with some of that excess electricity at night, so that they can let it run downhill through turbines at peak times. It's extremely inefficient, but it at least recaptures some of the energy that would otherwise be wasted. Tens or hundreds of millions of cars charging overnight using that (otherwise mostly wasted) capacity—and then unplugging in the morning—would be a huge business benefit to power companies.

That's good. I'm very worried about the profitability of power companies.

 

[Palmpilot]

...No one is telling you you need to give up whatever you are driving.

Within the last few days I saw mention of eventually getting all ICE vehicles off the road (in twenty years, IIRC).

 

[David Megginson]

Within the last few days I saw mention of eventually getting all ICE vehicles off the road (in twenty years, IIRC).

People will dream, but no, that can't happen practically. We can get a lot of ICE vehicles off the road—maybe even a significant majority of them—but (as many have mentioned in this thread), there's a hard limit on how far battery tech can go, and it just won't get there for long-haul trucking, construction vehicles, and lots of other high-power or long-endurance applications. It might not be ICE, but they'll need some kind of combustion for those to work, unless we string electrical lines above major roads (like with streetcars) and install pantographs on trucks and other long-haul/heavy-load vehicles.

 

[David Megginson]

That's good. I'm very worried about the profitability of power companies.

Here's the original context of the subthread:

Silly people.
The power industry is not going to allow high density, low cost power solutions (batteries, super capacitors, or anything else.) Because by Law, they are guaranteed a profit, and their profit comes WAY before your needs and welfare.

 

[David Megginson]

I'm not assuming anything about the battery other than it will be better than the ones we have now. I also said nothing about the charger.

I've noticed China has lots of electric vehicles. I only saw one gasoline powered motorcycle when I was there on Nov/Dec 2019. They have lots of electric cars and trucks. Somehow, they make it work, at least in the big cities.

Absolutely. Local travel is the killer app for electric vehicles, and from what I understand, most personal driving in China is local (you take a train or plane for intercity travel). Beijing's estimated 49,000 deaths/year from smog is a strong incentive to move away from internal-combustion engines in big cities (the way that London, England starting moving away from coal for heating after the huge death toll from pollution in the 1950s).

 

[Cap'n Jack]

Within the last few days I saw mention of eventually getting all ICE vehicles off the road (in twenty years, IIRC).

In Canada? The person I replied to lives there.

 

[Cap'n Jack]

Absolutely. Local travel is the killer app for electric vehicles, and from what I understand, most personal driving in China is local (you take a train or plane for intercity travel). Beijing's estimated 49,000 deaths/year from smog is a strong incentive to move away from internal-combustion engines in big cities (the way that London, England starting moving away from coal for heating after the huge death toll from pollution in the 1950s).

Most personal driving in any country is local. There are exceptions as mentioned in the thread.

People will dream, but no, that can't happen practically. We can get a lot of ICE vehicles off the road—maybe even a significant majority of them—but (as many have mentioned in this thread), there's a hard limit on how far battery tech can go, and it just won't get there for long-haul trucking, construction vehicles, and lots of other high-power or long-endurance applications. It might not be ICE, but they'll need some kind of combustion for those to work, unless we string electrical lines above major roads (like with streetcars) and install pantographs on trucks and other long-haul/heavy-load vehicles.

It depends on the long-haul trucking. I see a lot of trailers loaded onto train cars going through here. Having noted that, I don't know where they change between road and rail, other them outside of Memphis, TN. I also don't know if those places are usable to create shorter haul routes, nor how easily the train system could be changed to allow shorter haul traffic if it doesn't exist now.

 

[David Megginson]

Most personal driving in any country is local. There are exceptions as mentioned in the thread.


It depends on the long-haul trucking. I see a lot of trailers loaded onto train cars going through here. Having noted that, I don't know where they change between road and rail, other them outside of Memphis, TN. I also don't know if those places are usable to create shorter haul routes, nor how easily the train system could be changed to allow shorter haul traffic if it doesn't exist now.

That's true. We still have a lot of the infrastructure in place from when most goods within North America moved by rail or water—before end-to-end, just-in-time delivery via truck became dominant—and could go back to intermodal shipping if the economics made it attractive.

 

[Dan Thomas]

There are some little-known inconvenient truths about batteries. Just to supply current demand, terrific environmental devastation and human death is being perpetrated in China and Africa, among others. And that supposedly terrible CO2 we used to generate here with our industries is now being generated elsewhere, as if it doesn't count anymore. It's absurd.
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2021/01/25/toxic-secrets-behind-clean-energy/

This is Truth, not politics, no matter how one might try to spin it.

 

[David Megginson]

Yes, rare earth and carbon inputs to manufacturing are both issues — that's not exactly a big reveal, despite what some over-dramatic, self-described #TRUTH!!! bloggers might think (I mentioned the first earlier in this thread).

The only harmless way to reduce carbon is to travel less — the electric car isn't a magic panacaea that will let us keep doing the same thing as before with all upside and no downside. It's just a matter of weighing costs vs benefits of different means of propulsion for different applications, and increasingly, electric is coming out ahead of fossil fuels or biofuels for many (not all) uses.

About 15 (?) years ago, The Economist reported on research in this area. IIRC, factoring in the extra carbon inputs during manufacturing, it took 3 years of typical use for an electric car to break even with an ICE car for total carbon cost; after that, it turned into a net positive. And, of course, there are other issues like smog in cities like Delhi and Beijing that are killing hundreds of thousands every year, so reducing that is an additional benefit of electric vehicles independent of carbon reduction.

In our case, we don't drive much (we live in a walkable urban neighbourhood with good pyblic transit) and Ottawa doesn't suffer from smog, so we figure it makes more sense to keep our 2013 Mazda 3 running for now, since the carbon costs from its production are long-ago amortised. But when it wears out, we'll reassess and see if electric will be a better choice for a new car (not perfect, just better).