Electric Propulsion's Dirty Secret: Why Lithium Can't Fly (Or Float) Profitably
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Re: Electric Propulsion's Dirty Secret: Why Lithium Can't Fly (Or Float) Profitably
#2Flight is a luxury of the current times that will likely not last another 100 years except for the very rich.
Re: Electric Propulsion's Dirty Secret: Why Lithium Can't Fly (Or Float) Profitably
#3Flight is a luxury of the current times that will likely not last another 100 years except for the very rich.
I think we'll see the global rich (western middle class) continue to fly well past the onset of the famines and refugee waves.
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.
Re: Electric Propulsion's Dirty Secret: Why Lithium Can't Fly (Or Float) Profitably
#4Flight is a luxury of the current times that will likely not last another 100 years except for the very rich.
How dare you stand in the way of regular people burning hundreds of kilograms of fossil fuel in order to spend a couple days at the beach? /s
Re: Electric Propulsion's Dirty Secret: Why Lithium Can't Fly (Or Float) Profitably
#5lithium is most definitly profitable in thousands of applications including boats, and light aircraft, now.
The intercontinental heavy aircraft, and marine segment is not there yet, but there is a lot of progress bieng made every day, and every single major player in the transpotation sector is watching closely, as the chance of a disruptive battery technology de-stealthing is significant
Re: Electric Propulsion's Dirty Secret: Why Lithium Can't Fly (Or Float) Profitably
#6Flight is a luxury of the current times that will likely not last another 100 years except for the very rich.
I think we'll see the global rich (western middle class) continue to fly well past the onset of the famines and refugee waves. 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 will have to be taken from them
Be careful when advocating force towards others. Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, after all.
Re: Electric Propulsion's Dirty Secret: Why Lithium Can't Fly (Or Float) Profitably
#7I recently read The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson, and one of the ideas in it that I thought was very good was replacing our cargo ships with wind-powered ships, basically giant sailing ships. In the book, they were incredibly slow, with shipments taking months to complete, but if supply lines were set up correctly, that wouldn't matter for a lot of cargo. Cargo ships are a massive CO2 contributor, and it was interesting that a solution could be to return to sailing ships.
I know there are probably huge engineering problems preventing this from happening, so feel free to tell me why it's impossible.
Re: Electric Propulsion's Dirty Secret: Why Lithium Can't Fly (Or Float) Profitably
#8I recently read The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson, and one of the ideas in it that I thought was very good was replacing our cargo ships with wind-powered ships, basically giant sailing ships. In the book, they were incredibly slow, with shipments taking months to complete, but if supply lines were set up correctly, that wouldn't matter for a lot of cargo. Cargo ships are a massive CO2 contributor,…
There's nothing stopping it, here's a link to an article from 2023: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-66543643
Re: Electric Propulsion's Dirty Secret: Why Lithium Can't Fly (Or Float) Profitably
#9This appears to ignore the new technology that electric brings in: Reduced maintenance, (for aircraft) reduced weight in other parts of an aircraft, new propulsion capabilities that increase efficiency of the energy used, new performance envelopes (like flying much higher because the physics are totally different), etc etc. Sure. Take an existing vehicle optimized for burning things and just swap that small part and things look bad but start optimizing for the new way of doing things and the equation totally changes. Additionally, that 60x claim is getting old by the minute. We are getting to 300+ with advancements coming in so fast they are hard to keep track of. That 60x could drop to 10x or lower in just a few years and that, again, doesn't count the reduction in weight that could come from removing a literal explosion maker from an aircraft can achieve.
Re: Electric Propulsion's Dirty Secret: Why Lithium Can't Fly (Or Float) Profitably
#10Flight is a luxury of the current times that will likely not last another 100 years except for the very rich.
Actual comprehensive high speed rail networks would reduce the overall carbon footprint of travel by a huge factor, while still permitting a high overall degree of affordable mobility.