Peter wrote:
Anyway, what this comes down to is that even if battery technology delivered a usable electric aircraft, it would be powered mostly by…….. coal.
No, I think small electric aircraft will be driven by solar energy generated from PV collectors on the hangar roof. That would be an ideal combination and not even overly expensive. Hangars have large roofs and small aircraft are usually not flying a lot. So plenty of time to generate the electricity required. Ideally there will be some large local buffer battery which stores the electricity generated throughout the week and from which the planes can recharge in the weekend. One of the few things of which I am 100 percent certain that it will be implemented during my lifetime. I would even invest money in such a setup (I already own a small piece of a solar power plant in Spain).
I think small electric aircraft will be driven by solar energy generated from PV collectors on the hangar roof.
I can see that working for flying circuits in tiny planes, with a massive taxpayer subsidy for the huge areas of PV panels, but not for useful GA as we know it.
The numbers don’t add up otherwise.
Just to run one electric car for short local run-arounds, you need a big house with 5 figures’ worth of PV panels on the roof and a lot of sunshine.
Peter wrote:
but not for useful GA as we know it.
There are lots of people who buy microlights and LSAs which cost more than 100k€ (just look around at AERO Friedrichshafen). If each of these buyers contributes 10.000 Euros (10 percent of their aircraft cost) towards the solar roof of their hangar, they get free flying for the rest of their life in return. Completely without taxpayer subsidies. I don’t know if the UK has enough sunshine for that, but everything south of it definitely has.
Rwy20 wrote:
The other option would be to bureaucratically micro-manage all economic activity by requiring approval for each energy consuming or climate changing activity, and approve or disapprove each on a case-by-case basis
There is a third alternative. Forbid it all together, and without exceptions this works best.
It’s always nice to look at this online real time map
At this very moment Germany only produce 26% of the electricity from fossil fuel.
what_next wrote:
If each of these buyers contributes 10.000 Euros (10 percent of their aircraft cost) towards the solar roof of their hangar, they get free flying for the rest of their life in return.
How would you predict the resale market when the guy has to move jobs and houses to another area to maintain the high income that bought the 100K plane in the first place? My guess is that the guy would instead sell the whole package for let’s say 25K when moving, into a small pool of buyers.
At this very moment Germany only produce 26% of the electricity from fossil fuel.
It would do – sunny and windy just now
I let this thread go completely off the rails to see what happens.
It didn’t go too well, with some pretty nasty stuff posted, so it has been cleaned up. I have other stuff to do tomorrow apart from keeping an eye on it…
The topic is aviation and the environment.
Peter wrote:
The topic is aviation [GA] and the environment.
Which is a bit like classic cars and the environment 
Start flying gliders, or at least a TMG or maybe something electric, and the “problem” is solved, and that is a scientific truth (proven both analytically and experimentally). What I mean is that each and one of us can, if we want to, include the environment as a part of our “mission profile”. If that part is a major part, we can fly without polluting the environment at all. Not that GA is a big polluter, it isn’t, but such a mission profile is very interesting from an engineering point of view, and creates lots of goodwill also.
Actually you can run a lot more than a small e-car for run-arounds off solar panels.
https://m.phys.org/news/2017-06-self-sufficient-home-solar-panels-facade.html
Even Airbus has shelved the E-Fan in its original form as they estimate it to be already technologically obsolete (considering Siemens is powering a 260kW Extra already) and is hoping to test within three years (!) a 2 MW hybrid power unit on the upcoming E Fan X.
They are also toying with using multiple mini thrust sources and creating a blown wing effect, much like the NASA distributed propeller concept that was expertly pooh-pooh-ed in these pages.
On a very quick look at that article
In conventional solar power systems, the panels are connected in series, which means each one can generate only as much energy as the lowest-producing one
that is nonsense…
