I wonder at what density could airplanes start to use batteries?

Also, if this new battery is really as good as advertised with little to no drawbacks, then the range issue is solved for EVs as it's similar to how much time it takes to add gas to your car at a station.

Range has been solved for normal people for years now. Charging infrastructure... less so but getting good in some countries.

As for airplanes we need a different chemistry and there isn't a huge amount of work going in that direction right now, most money is currently focused on EV or stationary storage. Both of which can afford to trade off battery density (both weight and volume) for better longevity and price/kWh. LFP in particular is poorly suited for aircraft.

The chemistry that is probably best for aircraft right now is NMC but even then there are a lot of challenges around weight related to thermal runaway protection and general thermal management of the battery.

So for now electric planes are limited to trainer aircraft which are good for ~20-30mins on a single charge. Enough for a beginner pilot and CFA to go up and do some pattern work and practice some touch and go.

Unfortunately I think we need a 'big battery breakthough' or atleast more money being directed towards solving the problem before electric aircraft are much of at thing, even for experimental class.

Even before energy density passes jet-a electric aviation will start dominating and completely changing aviation. I suspect at the rate things are going that is just a few years away. One of the massive hurdles holding back innovation in aviation is certifying new engines. Electric motors are so simple that it will be much easier to certify them. Electric will also open up brand new aircraft designs since electric propulsion can go in places an incredibly hot jet engine can't. There are so many advantages that I can't wait for the next few years.

With probably 30-40% better density you could start realistically replacing trainer planes for flight schools for a portion of the fleet. The Pipistrel Velis Electro is going for this market now, but its 50 min range (including 30 min reserve) probably isn't quite enough. Under an hour is still pretty rough, but at say 80 minutes this would cover a good portion of initial lessons. And cost savings would be huge I'd think.

Somewhere between this and the energy density of jet fuel. These are 0.2 kWh/kg, jet fuel is 12 kWh/kg. There are some really lightweight 1-2 place airplanes that have very short range and are battery powered. There's a pretty big chasm between where we are now and replacing 737s.

Pretty cool but can the charging infrastructure keep up!? That's a lot of power per charger.

400 kW chargers are being deployed now. Europe's charger infrastructure plan wants 400 kW chargers available on TEN-T (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-European_Transport_Netwo...) as a baseline by 2026, 600 kW by 2028:

https://www.fleeteurope.com/en/new-energies/europe/article/f...

Alpitronic and Kempower make the best chargers.

Alpitronic's 400 kW chargers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4ZWN_-a2j4

Alpitronic HYC400s are getting to North America: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KW3C5yYSENw

Kempower's 400 kW chargers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qR2M5W6saAk

Gravity is deploying 500 kW chargers: https://insideevs.com/news/715496/gravity-charging-highest-p...

A key figure for gauging transition would be the hourly | daily kW equivilent of petrol|gasoline|fossil fuel consumption for a 'medium' city of (say) 1 million population.

How much additional electricity generation is required to replace petrol consumption (asuming electric cars, etc).

Related figures are what tonnages of "final" LFP batteries does that imply, and what tonnages of raw material mined, concentrated, and processed does that imply.

That kind of ballpark gives a feel for scaling out to larger country wide populations (along with variation on personal transport usage by city|country).

They have it at 2022. And we dont really see so many EVs at 600KM mark. If they have it in 2024 with 1000KM, it would have been prevalent in China already. This kind of bold claim, plenty. I wait and see the actual implementation on the road.

9 hours ago [0] (6 points)

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40171562

Sorry people overlooked your submission, but if it didn't get any comments it's not worth linking.

Unless that article is better in some way, in which case please explain that. But the new atlas article seems to have more details.

1km/s on a 1000km pack is a 3.6C charge rate. That's fast but not jaw dropping. Guessing it's a 100kWh pack, that's a 360kW charge rate, which is somewhat more than the 250kW Superchargers currently supply.

I think the real news is they're making a serious effort at large LFP packs.

Is 1000km from 100kWh a realistic number?

My guess was a lot more kW than that.

They're not telling us, so I'm assuming what's required for a very small, efficient car. It could easily be 50-100% more than that.

NIO got just over 1,000 km out of their 150 kWh battery in winter at an average speed of 83.9 kph:

https://cnevpost.com/2023/12/18/nio-150-kwh-battery-range-ch...

https://cnevpost.com/2024/04/15/nio-to-launch-2024-et7-apr-2...

This is what happens when government sets clear goals for technological advancement and subsidizes industry to meet those goals. The US used to do that, and we made huge leaps in technology and science for decades with that approach. And then some movie actor came in and convinced Americans to divert the tax money to do that back to the pockets of the super rich, by saying that government was the enemy. And we’ve stagnated ever since.

The US government still makes demands and subsidizes whatever it wants. It's not a problem with super rich, unless you mean super rich politicians and executives that sell the country out. We are falling behind mainly because everything is outsourced and the US holds a small fraction of the world's population anyway.

I feel like you didn’t understand my comment in the historical content in which I intended it. Government spending is directly responsible for huge technological leaps in the 20th century, and not today. Obama’s stimulus act funded loans to clean energy companies and was pilloried when bets failed. The country that I grew up in tossed billions into cool shit and nobody ever said boo about it, and we ended up world leaders for decades. The Chinese are doing that now, while we dicker around.

The country you grew up in was rich from the spoils of war as other countries had to rebuild everything. It's not merely because of spending that we were world leaders. We had the biggest manufacturing base in the world, and not so much debt. Now the situation is opposite. We have an epic amount of ever-expanding debt, plus most of our manufacturing has been outsourced. What we're left with is a country with 5% of the world's population and one with little capacity for self-sufficiency. Can spending more help us become leaders in something? It could happen. But look at the competition, look at the degredation in our capabilities, even the degredation in our culture. Most of the wealth in our world comes from natural resources and manufacturing, and our manufacturing is about the most expensive in the world.

>Obama’s stimulus act funded loans to clean energy companies and was pilloried when bets failed.

When the results don't match the investment, it is natural to cut back. Keep in mind Obama also presided over the global financial crisis of 2008, and the government had a number of urgent things to take care of. Incentives for clean energy never stopped, and in the case of EVs they are becoming annoying. We don't need an EV mandate. If they want people to use EVs, they need to make EVs that don't suck. That seems to be a lot to ask for, and the tech just isn't ready.