I wonder how energy costs would factor into these economics. A couple of thoughts off the top of my head: * drones run on electricity - they are less energy ef

I wonder how energy costs would factor into these economics. A couple of thoughts off the top of my head: * drones run on electricity - they are less energy efficient than ground vehicles, but this can be offset by cheapness of electricity - particularly in areas where battery recharge could be done by solar or wind. * The large banks of batteries required to make the drones economically efficient (I imagine it would be cheapest to have a couple sets of batteries per drone and swap them out to allow continuous drone operation, rather than recharging each individual drone) might be useful for secondary operations when delivery periods are slow - e.g. using the bank of solar charged batteries to power night operations when the next day's deliveries are going to be slow. Similarly I wonder how having an army of drones out in the world might have secondary economic impacts for the operators: * For a small power budget, the drones could be equipped with additional sensors to gather data on various things and provide a sensor stream for 3rd party purchase. * the video information I would imagine they already stream back could provide all sorts of benefit - selling the video to the news if a drone is in the area of a newsworthy event. * similar to the previous point, but for traffic info.