i just got back from a week in bali. we rent a mini ev 2 person car to get around and in the span for the whole trip we literally spend $0 because we charge them off the wall plug of the villa we stay at
but if we want to be pedantic the car is Wuling airev and iirc it has 17 kwh of battery. that is quite enough for us for the whole week, we only need to charge it once at 60%. so lets say its around 7 kwh. in Indonesia a kwh cost around $0.1. so for a whole week it only need less than a dollar for ‘gas’
I can understand a hybrid train because of certain sections of track electrification issues and the fact that diesel electric is how even trains that run entirely on diesel operate so you’re essentially just toting around a generator to operate your already electric engine. I understand hybrid cars with regenerative braking and range extension. I don’t really understand hybrid planes.
Like I can imagine electric is more efficient for takeoff because electric engines produce more initial power generally than what fossil can match per engine size(a big part of both hybrid trains and cars both using batteries for initial acceleration) and then you cruise with jet fuel. I’m just having a hard time imagining it is worth it from a defossil fuel perspective or from a straight efficiency perspective.
Combustion engines have maximum fuel efficiency at a specific RPM. A Hybrid has the advantage that you can run that engine at maximum efficiency 100% of the time and using the generated electrical energy to generate motion. The gains by being able to keep the ICE at peak efficiency are more than the loss you take from the conversion. That’s the same principle as in hybrid cars - look up Technology Connections video where he analyzes the behavior of his hybrid car. It is for sure preferable to than just the ICE directly, losing a lot of efficiency and therefor fuel because of differences in needed power output. Combining this into a plugin-hybrid makes - as you said - the takeoff use no or just the default amount of jet fuel at all.
This will not eliminate the need for jet fuel, but even a reduction is preferable to the status quo. Until we get batteries that are light enough while keeping energy density at least as high as now (preferably higher), purely electric long-range flight is not an option that’s available.
I really hope this will catch on for once, it could be a great solution for all those people who insist they have to do domestic flights… (in countries like Germany which aren’t that big comparatively speaking)
Yeah unfortunately this is only viable for extremely short flights 100-200 miles as the article says. Batteries are just to heavy and planes needs too much power for anything more.
These would be the perfect private jet for the ultra rich who take a jet to work a few minutes away, or to go shopping, but for commercial flights they’re basically not an option until we have a huge breakthrough in battery tech. We need the mythical “coming next year” for the last 20 years “solid state batteries”.
An experimental plane to help develop a future hybrid still another experimental phase away that will still be limited to regional travel due to autonomy issues. Still pretty awesome, but still some time away.
