And if EV planes become a reality, how much faster can it fly?
In: Engineering
Battery energy density is awful at the moment.
Take the use case of a car. Consider a 95kwh Tesla battery, which weighs over 600kg and takes up ~400L of space. If you have a gas engine that’s only 25% efficient, that’s about as much energy output as 36kg of gasoline. So a comparable battery will weigh around 20x more, and take up 10x more volume.
When a plane like a 737-800 can hold like 20,000kg of fuel…that energy density makes batteries a far worse option.
Additionally, there’s no opportunities for hybrid tech either. Hybrid cars harvest braking energy, and run engines at their most efficient rpm to get fuel savings. Planes don’t stop, and the engines are already designed to run at their most efficient rpm, so there’s no real opportunity for improvement.
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