Smil, V. (2021, November 1). Electric airplanes won't make much of a dent in air travel for decades to come. IEEE Spectrum. Retrieved November 7, 2021, from https://spectrum.ieee.org/electric-airplanes-wont-make-much-of-a-dent-in-air-travel-for-decades-to-come.
Electric Airplanes Won’t Make Much of a Dent in Air Travel for Decades to ComeA new portal includes best practices, programs, and events
Reason: Batteries are nowhere near able to sustain wide-body airliners over flights measuring in the thousands of kilometers
Photo: PIPESTREL
My summary of the article:
As is the case with most so-called 'breakthroughs' in technology, the optimistic prospects of new replacements of old techniques are over-exaggerated. This is exactly the case with the prospect that electric planes will soon replace conventional aircrafts powered by turbofan engines that use kerosene fuel.
Companies like Boeing and JetBlue has tried funding such electric aircraft projects, but all of them soon realized that their prospects were unrealistic. As the author of the article Vaclav Smil puts it, such optimistic attempts are not the core problem. In fact, these attempts and overambitious trials are necessary for the development of new technology that, once in while, does in fact lead to a breakthrough. The problem, however, is in the technological impossibility of electric aircraft performing as well as turbofan ones. Simply put, air traffic has only been rising at an ever-growing rate ever since the invention of aircraft (considering the COVID pandemic as an exception), and electric batteries just do not possess enough energy density compared to kerosene. As a general numerical comparison, kerosene provides nearly 12,000 Wh/kg, whereas the best commercial Li-ion batteries in the present day delivers about 300 Wh/kg, only 2.5% of kerosene. Even after considering the superior efficiency of electric motors compared to turbofans, the effective energy density of electric planes are still only 5% of conventional aircrafts. Moreover, while turbofan aircrafts become lighter throughout its journey by combustion of fuel, electric aircrafts carry their constant-mass batteries throughout the entire flight.
Also given that insane monetary investments are necessary in the airline industry, the pure effort required to introduce electric planes into the field of commercial flight would be enormous. Considering all these factors, Smil believes that flight by battery-powered aircrafts is unrealistic, at least at this moment.
My response of the article:
Advancement in technology always requires three essential foundations to work: an innovative idea, sophisticated and verified scientific theoretical background, and an economic calculation that such advancement would be truly an "improvement" from the status quo of that field. In my opinion, electric planes – as explained in detail in the article – fail in all of these three foundations. Firstly, with currently available battery technology, it is impossible for electric planes to conduct intercontinental flight due to electric cells' lack of energy density. Moreover, if the technology for electric planes is available, a great economic barrier lies in the process of manufacturing them for commercial use. Thus, for now, it can be said that commercial electric planes for intercontinental travel exists only as an "good idea".
This does not, however, mean that we must stop researching other methods of flight besides using turbofan engines and kerosene fuel. After all, kerosene is a limited resource that will one day run out, perhaps sooner than most of us think that time would come.
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