Electric Propulsion's Dirty Secret: Why Lithium Can't Fly (Or Float) Profitably

this post is a fake argument with no one? the typical internet outrage pattern of using overly dramatized language like "dirty secret" to describe something thats... common knowledge? not a secret at all? openly talked about at any and every relevant industries conferences and trade shows?

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?

The same thing could have been said years ago about solar power in california.

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)

Just going off the tweet about electric scooters being a scam: Nothing in that tweet is convincing.

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.

It just takes money. $100k-$300k/yr is plenty to have your pick of pretty good people, especially if there are any perks like the food being halfway decent (should be basically a given if you have to pay the chef a lot anyway).

“Gasoline’s dirty secret: it’s toxic, expensive and using it kills the planet.”

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.