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

• salsicha 1y ago
  This is exactly what the CTO at Supernal told me on my first day of work
• kumarski 1y ago
  Don't have time to reply to everyone. Clearly triggered a lot of programmers here, so I'll try to go point by point. Electric motors are ~3× more efficient, but the crushing 18:1 energy density disadvantage (170-180 Wh/kg usable vs. 3,200 Wh/kg for jet fuel) creates a physics trap no engineer can escape [1]. A staggering 70.3% of total energy is consumed before the damn thing even moves – manufacturing (35.2%), extraction (19.8%), and processing (15.3%) create an energy debt that makes the whole proposition a joke[2] Grids: Carbon intensity varies wildly (200-840g CO₂e/kWh), meaning your "clean" electric plane is often dirtier than conventional systems – that's not an opinion, it's EPA data [3]. Real-world performance nightmare is quantified: cold weather operations see a brutal 33% range reduction vs. just 6% for conventional, charging wastes 22.4% operational efficiency, and VTOL applications – which fanboys love to cite – require 2.5-3× more energy per mile than normal flight [4]. We've seen improvements (2.7× EV range increase since 2010), but we're still butting against fundamental chemistry limitations – lithium-ion cathodes achieve only 25-30% of theoretical capacity, and that's a brick wall no amount of startup capital can break through [5]. Synthetic fuels? Give me a break – 10-15% round-trip efficiency means you need 6.7-10× more renewable capacity than direct electrification, basically requiring us to cover half the planet in solar panels [6]. I explicitly acknowledge where electric makes sense (short-haul ferries under 50 miles, puddle-jumper aircraft), while demonstrating why crossing oceans remains physically impossible without a battery chemistry revolution [7]. lithium propulsion systems cost $245-380/kWh delivered vs. $75-110/kWh for conventional systems – that's 3.3× more expensive with no way to close the gap without massive taxpayer subsidies [8]. If this technology truly made economic and environmental sense, why isn't China – which manufactures most of the world's batteries and has the densest transportation networks requiring efficiency – adopting it at scale for their own infrastructure? They desperately need cleaner air and water, have explicitly prioritized environmental improvements in recent policy, and would recognize a truly superior EROI technology before anyone. Their purchase behavior speaks very loud. [1] Society of Automotive Engineers, Technical Paper 2024-01-0873, https://www.sae.org/publications/technical-papers/content/2024-01-0873 https://www.sae.org/publications/technical-papers/content/20... [2] Journal of Industrial Ecology, 24(1), 120-132, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/15309290 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/15309290 [3] EPA eGRID 2023, https://www.epa.gov/egrid https://www.epa.gov/egrid [4] IEEE Transportation Electrification, 10(2), 1582-1593, https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber=6687316 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber=668... [5] Nature Energy, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-022-01060-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-022-01060-5 [6] International Energy Agency, "The Role of Critical Minerals in Clean Energy Transitions", https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-critical-minerals-in-clean-energy-transitions https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-critical-minerals-in... [7] Maritime Economics & Logistics, 26(2), 112-128, https://link.springer.com/journal/41278 https://link.springer.com/journal/41278 [8] Journal of Transport Economics, 58(2), 234-248, https://www.journals.elsevier.com/journal-of-transport-economics-and-policy https://www.journals.elsevier.com/journal-of-transport-econo...
• lucidguppy 1y ago
  Flight is a luxury of the current times that will likely not last another 100 years except for the very rich.
  • cagenut 1y ago
    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.
    • generalizations 1y ago
      > 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.
      • holtkam2 1y ago
        They may not have been alluding to violence; perhaps something like democracy itself would be enough to take that lifestyle away from the middle class. If billionaires consolidate enough power & resources and push the tax burden onto the middle class which makes yearly vacations unaffordable
        • generalizations 1y ago
          Perhaps they were referring to economic force. But 'it will have to be taken' isn't a passive statement either way.
      • lukev 1y ago
        Ah yes. George Washington, Simon Bolivar, Vladmir Lenin, etc... famously incompetent.
• metalman 1y ago
  lithium 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
  • sokoloff 1y ago
    Aircraft getting lighter as they burn off fuel is a feature. Lithium energy storage doesn’t get lighter as it discharges, meaning the aircraft doesn’t get more efficient as stored energy decreases and the landing weights/speeds are higher than a comparable fossil fueled aircraft. I’m more hopeful that synthetic jet fuel will be a practical solution than batteries for long-range flight.
    • lolc 1y ago
      > meaning the aircraft doesn’t get more efficient as stored energy decreases While I read that, I imagined booster packs detaching from airplanes when they reach cruise height. In my mind they look like heavy quadcopters stuck to the wings. They would cycle back to the airport for charging before assisting the next climb.
      • metalman 1y ago
        the thing with all of that obvious engineering detail, is that it is old, very old, and liquid fueled heat engines have very little room for improvement, while, electricity storage mediums, have vast potential for improvement. Solid state batteries are already bieng investigated for use as structural components, and super capacitors have the potential to weigh very little, and are only waiting for a technology that allows for higher and higher internal surface area, something that many other technologys can make use of, and is bieng sought after by many research teams. Jet A will remain Jet A, and hot section components in jet engines are more or less stuck where they are ,and the best theoretical improvements, are not large. So there is a certain inevitability about how this plays out.
• chris12321 1y ago
  I 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.
  • hyperhello 1y ago
    There's nothing stopping it, here's a link to an article from 2023: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-66543643 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-66543643
  • xterminator 1y ago
    Why can't cargo ships deploy floating solar panels to power the ship motors?
    • dragonwriter 1y ago
      Because floating solar panels add drag proportional to their area, and it takes a lot of area of panels to power a motor that is sufficient for a cargo ship even without the added drag of the panels. Also, because oceans and the things one runs into in them aren't easy on solar panels being dragged along by cargo ships.
      • PicassoCTs 1y ago
        Would make more sense to produce chemical from solar energy harvested on the water fuels, collect the fuel and then use this with ships
        • retrocryptid 1y ago
          i wish there was more talk about this. it seems i heard a lot about making hydrocarbons from co2 in the air + solar or algae a couple years ago. if your hydrocarbons are made this way it seems they would be carbon neutral. i'm guessing there's more research to make it feasable since i haven't seen "carbon neutral gas alternative" at the local Chevron.
• jmward01 1y ago
  This 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.
  • MegaButts 1y ago
    > reduced weight in other parts of an aircraft The bigger problem is that the overall weight increases. Rearranging the COG doesn't really matter when most of your energy is spent literally fighting gravity. This is the first thing that popped up in google when I wanted to compare gravimetric density between gasoline and lithium ion batteries. Gasoline is still approximately 30x denser. That is at least one revolutionary breakthrough in battery technology away, if not several. https://research-archive.org/index.php/rars/preprint/download/388/937/724 https://research-archive.org/index.php/rars/preprint/downloa...
    • GaggiX 1y ago
      Considering the thermal efficiency of a modern jet engine, the usable energy compared to a lithium battery will be ~15 higher per kg, still bad, but not as bad.
      • timschmidt 1y ago
        Also some napkin math using common examples gives a range of 0.2 - 1.2 horsepower / kg for gasonline motors, and 8 - 21 horsepower / kg for electric. So even though the batteries weigh more, the motors weigh less.
• decimalenough 1y ago
  I can buy these arguments for airplanes. I'm more intrigued by the throwaway tweet claiming "electric scooter companies can never be profitable", because I don't see why this should be the case, unless "scooter" here is referring specifically to Ola style light motorcycles that compete directly with ICE equivalents, and not Lime style electric kick scooters that don't?
  • kumarski 1y ago
    Fair point, check the post again, I've posted on twitter about the benchmark for productively profitable venture and PE dollars. It's our taxpayer dollars at work. As a public market pegged to the same grid constraints, I prefer $POWL over most of the private lithium companies being pitched.
• ZeroGravitas 1y ago
  Only got to the subhead so far but mention of "energy return on investment" suggests this is going to be bullshit. edit: after reading, it was worse than I expected.
• cagenut 1y ago
  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?
  • renewiltord 1y ago
    NASA has quietly admitted that aliens have not been found on other planets. One fact fusion engineers don't want you to know: there's no commercial fusion plant Babies' "dirty secret": they pee without asking It's just the usual clickbait crap. I'm with you. Blocking this domain for myself.
  • heisenbit 1y ago
    Numbers are thrown around without making sure like is compared with like. The central argument is energy density and is supported by handwaving and a broken link to https://www.technologyreview.com/energy https://www.technologyreview.com/energy which does not exist and likly moved to https://www.technologyreview.com/topic/climate-change/ https://www.technologyreview.com/topic/climate-change/ but that is not even an article but just a section there.
• MiguelHudnandez 1y ago
  I appreciate by default any attempt to make a full accounting of the costs involved in energy transmission and storage. Many of these grid & battery costs are abstracted away from consumers and great effort must be made to understand them fully. That said, have you done a similar analysis involving the costs of removing finite organics from the ground, burning those, and releasing the byproducts into the atmosphere? Even if one is better in the short term we should still be working toward better options.
  • kumarski 1y ago
    Yes.
• m463 1y ago
  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)
  • crote 1y ago
    The math would already change quite a bit if airplanes had to play on a level playing field. For example, in the EU there are no taxes on aviation fuel. For a country like Germany that's the equivalent of a yearly 7 billion euro subsidy. Add fuel taxes and CO2 surcharges, and same-continent rail travel suddenly becomes a lot more attractive!
• MostlyStable 1y ago
  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.
  • ChuckMcM 1y ago
    Was going to post something similar. I love me a screed where the author rails against some group saying they don't know what they are talking about, and then goes on to demonstrate that they don't know what they are talking about. :-) For a long time I didn't understand what 'talking past each other' meant but this article is a good example of that. Mostly it's bad form to make sweeping generalizations. But let's be specific; From the article, here is the "TL;DR" -- Lithium propulsion for aircraft and boats is fundamentally unprofitable across the entire U.S. grid. The numbers don't lie: 60× worse energy density than jet fuel, 3.3× higher operating costs, 22% reduced asset utilization, and payback periods that consume 2/3 of the asset's lifespan. Anyone claiming otherwise is ignoring basic physics or hiding most of the energy and economic costs. So first let's talk definitions. "profit" is, by definition, "gross revenue" - "costs". "costs" come in two flavors, "direct", "marginal", and "operational". Direct costs are what you pay, every time for the thing you need. Marginal cost is what you pay for just "a bit more" of the thing you need. And operational costs are the costs you pay so that you can operate your business. So there is a direct cost of a lithium battery which is included in the manufacturing of a widget, there is the marginal cost of charging that battery up to full capacity, and there is the operational cost of maintaining the battery and presumably repairing or replacing it, when it doesn't do what you ask of it any more. There is a fourth cost, which is "externalities", that covers the cost of remediating the environmental damage which is done by your energy source and while important, and the focus of climate change awareness, its rarely considered in the discussion of 'profitable' vs. 'unprofitable.' If we keep this discussion on "lithium" which is the "gas" of these transportation modalities. You can say that building a battery pack is much more expensive than building a gas tank. So cost wise a gas is cheaper. The marginal cost of energy in Watts between gasoline and electricity leans heavily in electric's favor for a number of reasons. The operational costs of fueling and maintaining the "source power" for electric cars nominally similar. But all of that, has to be put into the context of the system cost which includes vehicle fabrication, power 'converters' (aka motors) that turn fuel into motion, and mechanical maintenance. Then you jump into a bigger frame of reference and consider all transportation modalities and how they combine as a system to get someone from point A to point B, and what are the costs of building, expanding, and operating that? The author doesn't see a path between 'here' and what they know to 'there' where Lithium batteries have "improved" non-vehicle transportation modalities over what fossil fuels can do. That's fair, I don't see one either precisely, but there are interesting paths to explore. Foreclosing one's thinking to possibilities on those paths is not usually the right thing to do. A better strategy is to think about it in terms of what would have to be true in order for these paths to be viable updates to the way we travel/ship/transport.
• testing22321 1y ago
  “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.
  • BLKNSLVR 1y ago
    It took my wife and I actually buying an electric car and running it for a few months to actually convince family members that electric cars are a worthwhile technology. They were fervently against us buying one, so much so that we had to avoid conversation about it and outright lie to them about our intentions. "You can't take it on a driving holiday." Yeah, we'll manage with one of our other two existing cars for that, like we have when we've taken one of our previous once every couple of years driving holidays. "You can't tow with it." Thank fuck, I hate towing and I can't remember towing anything in the last 15 years. The electric car, a Nissan Leaf, is perfect for 99% of our use cases. The whole family love it. It's our "first in best dressed" car. Even smart people are fucking stupid about plenty of things.
• xnx 1y ago
  > Electric scooter companies by definition can never be profitable Lost me right at the start by being proud(?) of this wrong understanding.
• AndrewDucker 1y ago
  If you used floating wind/solar farms as recharging points across the ocean, how much space would they take up?
  • kumarski 1y ago
    impractical, the number of ships to install these things is already constrained, not to mention the dispatch, repair, and transmission costs.
• baq 1y ago
  You don’t need to rant when it’s enough to show that a few dozen airliners consume a day’s worth of a nuclear reactor power production (for some size of an airplane and a nuclear reactor; we should be accurate within an order of magnitude). Imagine every single airport needing its own huge ass power plant and you get your point across in an HN comment. Not sure what’s the point in attacking physicists, either. They should be the first ones pointing this out and I can’t imagine one not nodding in agreement.
  • beloch 1y ago
    His beef against physicists is likely rooted in confirmation bias. Musk has a BA in physics that some debate if he even completed, but one bad egg does not prove the rule. It would be just as easy to point out engineers who have gone on to lead dodgy enterprises but, again, a few bad eggs do not prove the rule. His reason for attacking another group is likely to make his own group look superior. This works on the playground and in more professional situations than it really should. He might also just be airing his prejudices thoughtlessly. Either way, it's probably going to limit the audience he reaches and invite some nasty responses. He'd do well to avoid spewing such nonsense in the future.
  • retrocryptid 1y ago
    but the metric the OP was using was power density. nuke fuels are MUCH more energy dense than hydrocarbon fuels. but putting a reactor on each plane would probably have negative externalities. but mixing your comment with a few others, maybe a nuke plant on the ground that cracks the co2 in the atmosphere to make carbon neutral hydrocarbon fuel.
    • wkat4242 1y ago
      > but putting a reactor on each plane would probably have negative externalities. Probably? It would be a disaster every time one crashes, would carry a huge proliferation and terrorism risk. Oof. In the 50's some countries were that crazy and they even put reactors in space. Two of which crashed and one contaminated a huge area in Canada. Luckily common sense prevailed and these things don't happen anymore. Though nuclear ships still exist, there's only a few icebreakers in the civilian fleet AFAIK.
• toast0 1y ago
  I suspect that there's niches where battery electric boats and maybe planes do make sense. My state's ferry system is investing in electrifying, because they project it reduce operating costs. The 'easy' part is moving towards hybrid systems that can move with diesel or battery; this is projected to save fuel even without shore charging. The hard part will be making shore charging work. Our grid is mostly hydro, so switching from diesel to electric should be better for emissions and the operating budget. If the routes were longer, shore charging wouldn't be very relevant, but they're short enough that many routes could work without diesel most of the time.
  • whall6 1y ago
    Hot swappable batteries!
  • seszett 1y ago
    We also have electric ferries here in Antwerp and Ostend. I don't think they're hybrid, although it's not clear when they get charged, I would assume during the wait times (about 15 minutes wait and 5 minutes ferrying) but I have not noticed them actually connecting anywhere, maybe I just haven't noticed though. The communication says it can sail for three hours on batteries, so they must charge during the day while operating. And at my other place around Nantes they're building a new ferry that is supposed to be hybrid electric/hydrogen. I'm not very optimistic on hydrogen though so I don't know. The latest info say the budget has tripled and the delivery has been reported from 2026 to 2030.
    • svnt 1y ago
      Most of them seem to perform opportunity charging (while loading/unloading), using direct rapid charging via pantograph. See eg https://www.energymonitor.ai/sectors/transport/the-secret-to-electric-ferries/ https://www.energymonitor.ai/sectors/transport/the-secret-to... I have also seen designs for ferries to wirelessly charge underwater while docked. Wireless charging can be quite efficient when the two halves comprise nesting physical features with similar tolerances to actual transformers. But I have not seen this implemented, presumably due to biofouling problems.
  • 1y ago
• mangecoeur 1y ago
  Finance bro decides tweets are better evidence than physics… nothing to see here
  • kumarski 1y ago
    former engineer, but w/e.
    • throw-qqqqq 1y ago
      I found it funny that you felt a need to comment on the “finance bro”-label while simultaneously labeling HN-users as “programmers”: > I'm getting roasted by programmers, I'll survive. … often chosen as a sufficiently insulting label to dismiss software engineers. I may be interpreting your choice of words beyond what is reasonable - as you said: you’ll survive ;)
• tag2103 1y ago
  I'm not sure he brings anything new to the argument, well except a disdain for physicists.
  • kumarski 1y ago
    fair point, but most people don't open up chemistry books.
• trhway 1y ago
  Current lithium batteries Tesla - 270+Wh/kg, cheap AliBaba - 250+Wh/kg. Gasoline/jet fuel - 12KWh/kg, with 30% thermodynamic efficiency - 3.6KWh/kg. If one takes into account piston engines weight and their expensive maintenance or how expensive jet engines overall, the electric seems to have a very good niche of short range planes, and for multi-rotor VTOL it is unbeatable.
  • kumarski 1y ago
    Factor in complete system requirements—cooling, casings, and safety systems—that 270 Wh/kg battery delivers only 170-180 Wh/kg of usable energy. Jet fuel still maintains an 18-19× energy density advantage (3.2 kWh/kg vs. 0.17 kWh/kg) at the system level, which explains the fundamental range limitations we're seeing in electric aircraft development. For VTOL applications specifically, it demands 2.5-3× more energy per mile than conventional flight, electric air taxi prototypes remain limited to 60-80 mile ranges—impressive engineering, but not yet practical for replacing most aviation applications.
    • Panzer04 1y ago
      I'm sorry, what? That is an absurd assertion. Batteries are incredibly efficient, like 95-99% discharge efficiency for capacity. They're already bad for this use case, exaggerating it just makes you look bad.
• api 1y ago
  I remember seeing loads and loads of analyses like this back in the 2000s on a site called The Oil Drum about why electric cars would never work at scale. (Spoiler: My family has two EVs.) They always assume that the technology will never get better, that industrial economies of scale don't exist and therefore that prices don't decrease with scale, that currently developed reserves of resources like lithium equal total reserves, etc. I do think it will be a while before electrification of long haul aviation is practical. Aviation -- all of it -- accounts for only 7% of global oil consumption as of 2024. We could cut oil consumption by more than 80% without touching aviation. Most oil is burned in cars and trucks and those can be electrified today, so we should focus our energy on that and on replacing fossil fuels in electricity generation and take the win there. Related tangent: The popularity of toxic dogmatic pessimism on the political left is really problematic. It stops people from offering positive, expansive visions of the future. It's one reason the fascists are winning by default. They don't buy this shit, so they tell stories about the future that aren't "and then we all die in a great Malthusian catastrophe, the end." The fascist vision of the future sucks, but it's better than that, so it wins hearts and minds. Ask yourself: what if our civilization doesn't collapse? Then what? The assumption that it will collapse prevents people from thinking about the future. Malthusianism is a thought stopping cliche.
  • pfdietz 1y ago
    The Oil Drum was converted to a static archive site in 2013, in part because they were finding it hard to attract quality content. Gee, maybe that was because it was clear Peak Oil (in the we're running out sense) wasn't happening? This comment was made to the shuttering announcement: "8 years means The Oil Drum came online in 2005, basically matching the start the current plateau in crude oil production." Global oil production has increased since then. The price of West Texas crude has gone from $100 (which would be $136 in today's dollars) to $64 now. The left wing pessimism stems from a moralistic view. The underlying idea is that we deserve to suffer, so suffering is predicted.
    • api 1y ago
      I didn't mean to imply that the right didn't have its own doomer narratives. The current hotness seems to be demographic predictions of doom, "great replacement" theories, etc. I'm very skeptical of those too. What I was getting at though was -- I think the left allows its doomer narratives to be intellectually paralyzing. If everything is going to crash and collapse and burn, there's no need to actually try to solve problems or offer a compelling narrative about the future. The right doesn't do this. They feed their own doomer narratives into a "rage against the dying of the light" narrative. This results in all kinds of ugly racism and persecution and authoritarianism, sure, but it doesn't lead to paralysis. So, as I said, they win by default. In the battle for hearts and minds, they win if they're the only ones that show up. Edit: Another way of saying it would be to say that for the left its doomer narratives are demotivating, while the right treats its doomer narratives as motivating.
• retrocryptid 1y ago
  i would have given this guy credit if he compared cost of production for petro fuels when talking about energy debt. also conflates power with energy, but fine. if you talk about cost (dollar or kilowatt hour) per joule delivered to a vehicle and then compared the total cost of electric vs. the total cost of petro, i would listen. but he ignored the fact that petro fuels cost money, energy and water to produce. and there some things electric motors can do that ice can't. an electric ekranoplan isn't too infeasible, but we know from soviet studies you can't keep salt water out of an aspirated motor when you're that close to the water's surface. turns out electric motors can be sealed against water. and dissing physicists? wtf? makes me think he failed out of an engineering physics degree cause he didn't understand math. as we used to say, the limit of a bs or be as gpa approaches zero is bba.
  • kumarski 1y ago
    Full lifecycle comparison included both systems https://www.journals.elsevier.com/journal-of-transport-economics-and-policy https://www.journals.elsevier.com/journal-of-transport-econo...
  • kumarski 1y ago
    I directly compared them in visualization 6 ($75-110/kWh conventional vs. $245-380/kWh lithium, all externalities included). Electric ekranoplans would be badass, and sealed motors solve one problem, but battery chemistry is the real beast – we're bumping against molecular bond limitations, not just engineering challenges. Current lithium-ion cathodes are only achieving 25-30% of their theoretical capacity limits, while lithium-sulfur promises 2-3× better density but sacrifices cycle life. Trust me, I want electric propulsion to succeed, but we need fundamental chemical breakthroughs beyond intercalation mechanisms. Got any data on those Soviet experiments? Those Russians were decades ahead on some wild electrochemistry concepts.
• Workaccount2 1y ago
  Your being a bit disingenuous by not comparing the relative efficiencies of electric vs gas propulsion. Electric motors are ~3x as efficient. They also can recharge by capturing energy during use. In a car for example, you need about 9 gallons of gas in a 33mpg car to get 300 miles. This is equivalent to a 75kWh EV. On paper though, with the conveniently leaving out details math this guy is using (or maybe it's too physics for him) you only need 2.2 gallons.
  • kumarski 1y ago
    System-level efficiency negates motor advantage https://www.sae.org/publications/technical-papers/content/2024-01-0873 https://www.sae.org/publications/technical-papers/content/20...
  • kumarski 1y ago
    The energy required to extract, process and manufacture lithium batteries (70% of total lifecycle energy occurs before the vehicle moves) Grid transmission losses (5-8% average, up to 15% in extreme conditions) Battery charging/discharging efficiency losses The dramatic efficiency reductions in adverse conditions (33% range loss in cold weather) For aircraft and marine applications specifically (which was my focus), the energy density problem (60x worse than jet fuel) creates cascading inefficiencies as you need more battery weight, which requires more energy to move, which requires more batteries, and so on. Electric cars have different economics than aircraft/boats and can make more sense in certain contexts. But my analysis was specifically about why lithium propulsion for aircraft and marine vessels faces fundamental economic and physics challenges that can't be solved with current technology. The tires on an electric vehicle wear down about 20% faster because of the load bearing of the battery weight.
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    • throw-qqqqq 1y ago
      I agree that planes are not likely to be electrified in the near future with current tech. Not sure about marine though. Ships benefit from the square/cube law: square the hull area -> the volume is cubed. E.g. if you double the size of a ship, the drag increases 4x but it can carry 8x the weight. So larger ships are more efficient than smaller ones (at carrying containers/bulk/etc at scale). Here in northern Europe, we already have electrified car carrying ferries etc. Ocean going vessels will take longer though.
• scythe 1y ago
  But they can do the ground effect pretty well, because the motors become lighter: https://www.regentcraft.com/news/regent-begins-sea-trials-of-first-passenger-carrying-seaglider https://www.regentcraft.com/news/regent-begins-sea-trials-of...
• refulgentis 1y ago
  This is a really nice article, in that its long and provides a good example of knowing everything yet nothing. Setting aside individual problems with it, this is because it suffers from a broad and blindingly obvious problem: investment is occurring in this area b/c it will be absolutely politically unpalatable in 20 years to still be emitting CO2. A long analysis showing lithium is more expensive than just using gas is unnecessary, and not even wrong when its used to prove VCs are dumb or whatever. Things are going to get that bad. Mark my words. It's like how it was obvious COVID was going to be a pandemic after January 2020. You could derive it from basic #s. They're not looking to be cheaper-than.
  • neuroelectron 1y ago
    What's wrong with CO2? It's not a serious issue, it's just an easy proxy for real environmental damage, focusing on CO2 simplifies complex issues like deforestation, pollution, resource depletion, and actual toxic emissions from the rest of the world. The idea is we're going to implement another tax on the plebs to drive a carbon economy and that will compensate for the damage the elites and 3rd worlders are doing. Then on top of that all the other inherent taxes like lithium batteries, transmission, windmill subsidies, solar recycling, and so on. And of course, this has to be done on the back of the most productive people in society because who else is going to do it.
    • refulgentis 1y ago
      I honestly don't know what's going on here. I don't know how "we collectively de-fossil fuel and some prices may go up who knows, science!" becomes "damage by elites and 3rd worlders" and "tax" becomes "lithium batteries" "transmission" "windmill subsidies" "solar recycling", and given all that, how it's being done on the backs of the most productive in society (is this a fancy way of saying: people who buy things will buy things with batteries?) If the idea is strictly "What's wrong with CO2"...who said CO2? :)
  • kumarski 1y ago
    Sulfur Hexafluoride and Nitrogen Trifluoride proliferate under a CO2 minimization regime. Nobody is arguing with Arrhenius proofs. Nitrogen trifluoride (NF3) is a potent greenhouse gas with a global warming potential (GWP) of 17,200 over a 100-year period, meaning it's 17,200 times more effective than carbon dioxide (CO2) in trapping heat in the atmosphere. This GWP value is used to calculate the CO2 equivalent of NF3 emissions.
• wkat4242 1y ago
  The profitability will come when we factor in the environmental damage in the prices. However the elephant in the room at least for aviation is that the energy per kg is about 50 higher for kerosene than for lithium batteries. A very large part of an airliner is fuel already. 50 as much? Not gonna happen. This will remain a really short range thing unless a really amazing breakthrough happens.
  • pfdietz 1y ago
    One possible path is the hybrid aircraft, where combustion turbines or fuel cells produce electric power that drives small ducted fans via electric motors. The enabling technology here is superconductors. Airbus is working on superconducting motors and generators for such hydrogen-powered aircraft. One can imagine regenerative braking in the fans, for example to recover energy as aircraft descend, and also with batteries providing emergency backup power.
    • lawrenceduk 1y ago
      Pilot here, I don’t think this is right. Aircraft typically operate at 80-100% power output. It’s not the average 20% power output of your car. Weight is pretty much everything, the savings from regenerative braking in an aircraft are almost 0% but the cost of enabling it is some tons. This tech makes loads of sense in a car but I’ve never flown an aeroplane in stop-start traffic because that’s not how the sky works.
      • wkat4242 1y ago
        Indeed and an aircraft never really 'brakes' like a car does, except for 20 second on the ground (including thrust reversers). Even in a descent you would have significant forward thrust. The drag does all the braking. And you can't regenerate that. PS I'm a hobby pilot so please correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think even an airliner would idle their engines during descent.
      • pfdietz 1y ago
        I don't see how that can possibly be correct, at least for commercial airliners. An airliner will use maximum power at takeoff, somewhat less for climbing, and much less during cruise. The figure I see is takeoff fuel consumption/hour is like 3x cruise fuel consumption/hour. Power needed will also decline as fuel is burned off, since the required lift goes down.
• zik 1y ago
  His estimate the LCoE of an electric vehicle with lithium batteries is off by a factor of ten. My back-of-the-napkin calculations make it to be $0.22–0.25 per kWh. Let's compare two vehicles - an EV car vs an ICE car - in terms of their energy costs per mile, including energy storage. Using the above numbers the EV comes out to around $0.07 per mile including the lifetime costs of the battery, and the ICE comes out to around $0.125 per mile. In short - his numbers are completely wrong and when calculated correctly prove the opposite of what he's trying to say.
  • hedora 1y ago
    Another way (from first principles): Assume you buy two cars per driver. The driver parks one car at their solar panels at a time, so one is available for use 100% of the time, and at least one can charge off the panels 100% of the time. Assume a 10kw solar system with no batteries, but with a level 2 charger. That costs $28K this year. Assume $50K per car. The system cost is $128K. Assume the climate is such that you can charge the cars at 6kw (max output of the charger) for an average of 8 hours a day (pessimistic in summer, optimistic in winter). This setup should last about 10 years. (Or sell the cars after 5 and get money back for new cars.) That’s 365 * 10 * 8h * 6kw usable for the cars, or 175.2MWh, giving us $0.73 per kWh. Clearly the sky is falling. I’m going to get a steam engine for my buggy! I forgot to figure the depreciation of the cars. We wasted one because this scheme is dumb, so the depreciation for an equivalent ICE car would be zero. For the other car, I think it’s reasonable to assume 90% depreciation. Say the ICE car depreciates $40K. We can sell the two EVs for a total of $10K. Now the total cost (sans car) for the system is $78K, or $0.445 per kwh — cheaper than California’s grid. I forgot to figure interest on the $78K of capital. At 8% average return, that’s a bit over 2x, getting it closer to a dollar per kwh. For a 4 mile/kwh car, that’s $0.25/mile. Of course, if you assume the existence of civilization, then the price drops a lot. For instance you could only buy one car, and you could size the solar smaller, or also plug the house into it. Anyway, in my hypothetical mad maxian hellscape that’s experiencing healthy, steady economic growth and has access to cheap refined gasoline, he’s still off by a factor of 2.5x.
  • cryptonector 1y ago
    > Let's compare two vehicles - an EV car vs an ICE car - Ok, but TFA is about planes (and boats), not cars. That's a big caveat because neither planes nor boats can do regenerative braking, and planes need to be light. Boats can get big enough to float even if the power plant is heavy, though there is a maximum to what is reasonable.
• londons_explore 1y ago
  For the marine uses specifically, the use of hydrofoils promises to dramatically reduce the amount of energy needed for movement at any decent speed. Previously hydrofoils weren't used because they rely on complex feedback mechanisms to maintain ride height despite waves etc. Sure, someone could pair hydrofoils with gasoline engines, but I suspect they won't, and that means hydrofoil+electric will win out over conventional hull+hydrocarbon fuels for a bunch of use cases.
  • Animats 1y ago
    Probably not. Hydrofoil boats work OK, but few applications need the speed. The US Navy went through a period of hydrofoil enthusiasm, and built some.[1] Boeing built a hydrofoil ferry, and some are still in service. The Navy version used 10x as much fuel per hour in hydrofoil mode, running off a gas turbine. Of course, it was going fast in that mode. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQ2sSRBMPqs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQ2sSRBMPqs
    • londons_explore 1y ago
      > few applications need the speed. Speed is key to profitability for most usecases. If you are transporting people from A to B, and you can do it in half the time, then you can make twice as many trips per day, doubling revenue (or, if there isn't enough demand, you can buy a smaller boat and reduce your capital costs whilst maintaining the same revenue). And thats before you consider that by going faster you might win more marketshare because the users want the fastest route. And you can often charge extra per person/per ton for faster/express services.
      • Animats 1y ago
        Not in shipping. See "Slow Steaming".[1] Most container ships could go much faster than they normally do. Sadly, the S.S. United States, the fastest transatlantic liner ever, is about to be disposed of by sinking.[2] 35 knot top speed. Southampton to New York in 3.5 days. No market for that once air travel crossed the Atlantic. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_steaming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_steaming [2] https://6abc.com/post/what-are-doing-ss-united-states-historic-ocean-liner-stripped-prepared-sinking-off-floridas-gulf-coast/15976392/ https://6abc.com/post/what-are-doing-ss-united-states-histor...
• 0xbadcafebee 1y ago
  I came to the comments hoping for lots of electric apologists not reading the article and I was not disappointed As a recap (for those who don't like to read) - 70% of EV cost comes before the vehicle ever moves and must be recouped over the life of the vehicle (and takes much longer than traditional fuels) - the energy density & cost of certain fuels is the only reason certain vehicles are able to be profitably operated in the first place - the only way to create enough energy to match said fuels/demand with electrics (at present) would be to hook up coal or nuclear plants to airports, and even then it'd be expensive as shit - we basically need a 5x improvement in battery energy density at minimum to even think about profitability, and that's only one of the things that would need to be addressed before it's practically feasible
  • Panzer04 1y ago
    What do you mean? Virtually no one is arguing that marine or air is viable given current tech. The article author though demonstrates some clear lack of understanding about more viable tech though, given his absurd assertion about the profitability of EV scooter companies. Ground-based EVs like cars and ebikes are clearly here to stay and are going to replace almost all fossil-fueld based equivalents.
• johnea 1y ago
  I'm not so sure about this assessment. But one thing I would agree with is that Li ion is not the ultimate battery chemistry. Several others with greater density, increased cycle counts, and more readily available minerals are in development. Of course there's BYD, which was a battery company before an EV maker: https://engineerine.com/byd-blade-battery/ https://engineerine.com/byd-blade-battery/ And a survey of upcoming chemistries and technologies: https://thecalculatedchemist.com/blogs/news/the-future-of-energy-storage-exploring-advanced-battery-chemistry-and-material-innovations https://thecalculatedchemist.com/blogs/news/the-future-of-en... Just another indication of why we should have started emphasizing battery electric power, and the chemical research into possible solutions, 50 to 75 years ago when the problem of CO2 altering the atmosphere became scientifically indisputable.
• ggreer 1y ago
  This post seems to either be misinterpreting facts or deliberately skewing them to argue for a specific conclusion. For example, it claims that "According to Gruber et al. (2021), a single ton of lithium extraction guzzles about 500,000 gallons of water." But the source link[1] is an abstract to a different paper titled Oil import portfolio risk and spillover volatility, which has no author named Gruber. So I have no idea if the claim is true or not. What I do know is that lithium is extracted from brine that is pumped out of the ground, then evaporated. It isn't useful for anything else, as it's far too salty for irrigation or drinking. And there are plenty of other ways to get lithium. Brines are just the most economically feasible option right now. Another claim is, "The International Energy Agency documents that producing battery-grade lithium compounds demands 50-70 kWh of energy input per kilogram." but again, if I follow the link[2], I can't find that information anywhere. Maybe he's deriving the figure from some graph in one of the sections of the report. But assuming it's true, a typical 80kWh battery contains around 10kg of lithium, which would be 500-700kWh of electricity. If we pessimistically assume retail consumer prices, that's $50-100 worth of electricity embodied in the lithium. This is a tiny fraction of the total cost of the battery. It's 5-10 charge cycles out of the >1,000 that is expected of an EV battery. And both of these claims neglect the fact that lithium in batteries is not destroyed over the life of the battery. It can be recycled once the battery has failed or degraded. After that he says, "Here's the uncomfortable truth from EPA's eGRID database: the carbon intensity of our electrical grid varies by a factor of 4× depending on where you are." and links to the EPA's Emissions & Generation Resource Integrated Database.[3] Again, the link is to a general site and not the specific information he's referencing. I did find CO2 emissions per megawatt hour in the data explorer.[4] The most carbon-intense subregion I could find in the continental US was SRMW, which corresponds to most of Illinois and Missouri. Its CO2 emissions are 1,238lbs/MWh, which is 562g/kWh. Typical EV efficiency is around 250 watt-hours per mile, but let's assume 300 watt-hours per mile to account for losses in transmission, charging efficiency, etc. In that case, traveling one mile will have used electricity that emitted 168 grams of CO2. Burning a gallon of gasoline emits 8.9kg of CO2, so a gas car would need to get over 52mpg to emit less than 168 grams of CO2 per mile. Again, that's in the most coal-heavy subregion on the EPA map. I don't know where he gets the "carbon break even point" from, as it would require incredibly inefficient EVs or incredibly efficient gas cars. There's also a claim that 70% of the energy consumption of EVs happens before they ever move. This claim is both misleading and false. To understand why it's misleading, consider a steam powered vehicle. Compared to a gas vehicle, it requires much less energy to construct than to run. But that's because steam powered vehicles are incredibly inefficient and need many times more energy to travel the same distance as a gas vehicle. EVs do require more energy to construct than gas vehicles, but they quickly make up for that by being more efficient to run. Battery production uses approximately 30-35kWh per kWh of battery capacity.[5] So an 80kWh battery will require 2,400-2,800kWh to produce. If the battery is used for 100,000 miles and then thrown away (not recycled so some of the embodied energy can be recovered), then at 300 watt-hours per mile, the battery will have stored and discharged 30,000kWh over its life. Even using these pessimistic assumptions, the battery's embodied energy is less than 10% of the energy used by the vehicle over its lifetime. In summary, the whole post is poorly reasoned and based on information that is either misinterpreted or nonexistent. If its conclusions are correct about anything, it's by accident. 1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0301420720310047 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014... 2. https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-critical-minerals-in-clean-energy-transitions https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-critical-minerals-in... 3. https://www.epa.gov/egrid https://www.epa.gov/egrid 4. https://www.epa.gov/egrid/data-explorer https://www.epa.gov/egrid/data-explorer 5. https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3298/12/1/24 https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3298/12/1/24
• floxy 1y ago
  Why do lithium battery prices keep going down? Because the Chinese are subsidizing everything for us? Or that battery production is getting more efficient over time? I guess my spidey sense gets a little tingly when sourcing data from papers published in 2021 and 2022. A.) Covid, B.) 4 year old papers are based on data that is even older, and it seems like things are changing fast with respect to batteries. Not to say that battery-electric planes are coming anytime soon. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-lithium-ion-batteries-keep-getting-cheaper/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-lithium-ion-batteri...
• Panzer04 1y ago
  Pretty classic arguing a point no one makes. Sea and air electric travel is and has always been the final frontier of transport electrification, and no one expects it to come easily. As tech currently exists I don't see a path for battery technology to supercede existing fossil-fueld solutions. That could change though if newer, more advanced battery tech comes out but for now it's just not really commercially feasible. I wouldn't trust a thing this guy says about it though, because he appears to know essentially nothing about the topic he is talking about. I'm glad he includes that tweet at the start because it demonstrates his own lack of knowledge instantly. It's hilarious that he actually is off by a factor of ten :D
• kjkjadksj 1y ago
  Aren’t airlines investing into zero carbon biofuels? Seems like that is not a bad route to go because you use the same paradigm of airliner but the fuel is carbon neutral and not contributing to greenhouse. Although it does continue to affect air quality downwind of the airport.
• econ 1y ago
  I would use the aircraft to ship batteries and win the puzzle.
• kkfx 1y ago
  Allow me to add a suggestion: how much roads costs? Because one point in eVTOL is in a not so near future ditching roads. Crafting a "light" society who could keep up without roads or at least with much less of them.