I think this is a big reason electric regional and short distance VSTOL/eSTOL will take off for both light cargo and passenger flights.
Electric aircraft aren’t on paper a great bet right now when you look at energy density and weight but that is an easy trap to get stuck in, you have to zoom out and consider how alternative energy generation potential in certain areas like arid deserts or places with a lot of wind energy to exploit could be used to charge electric aircraft with large batteries that could then fly to other regions and potentially make use of that energy in a different region than the one the alternative energy genertion occurred in. Of course that requires huge batteries but consider that alternative energy generation can “subsidize” flights to and from regions without much alternative energy/expensive energy because one leg of the journey is guranteed to be unusually cheap.
Electric aircraft could fly from alternative energy rich regions charging up for the bulk of their flights on affordable low carbon footprint energy to areas without it and then if need be charge off more expensive electricity sources until the aircraft can reach an alternative energy rich region/conditions again.
To put it into as few words as possible there is an undeniable logic here that if placing some alternative energy that cannot be currently used into battery storage is a good idea, than placing some of that energy into batteries that can fly to other places that need electricity or affordable flights is an even better idea once you work out all the difficult details.
That inherently IS the problem of green power. With combustible and nuclear you can regulate output, with wind and solar you, unfortunately, can’t.
It is a made up problem. It looks at a very different system with the tools of a mostly centralised fossil fueled energy grid.
Pumped hydro, biomass, tidal power, battery storage, high-voltage direct current, smart grids, vehicle2grid, heat pumps: the list of solutions is long. Most of them have been well researched, they just need to be implemented.
You don’t need base load in a more flexible system.
I agree wholeheartedly. Solving the issue of high wintertime electricity use is not about adding capacity, it is about driving down demand. High winter time electricity costs is unfortunate, but it will help making that change. High winter electricity costs will incentivise innovation in energy/heat storage to help reduce electricity needs. And that in turn will help keep electricity costs down for everybody. The municipality im in is currently building 2 heat storage facilities to try the technology. Fingers crossed it will pan out well! For a country like Sweden with approximately 2-2,5 million small houses, if each had a 10MWh heat battery on-prem that’d approximately equal the energy output of all nuclear sites in the country for the sunless 5 months…
These tools surely do exist, but then we shall be talking not about replacing the energy generation part, but replacing the whole energy supply system. And replacing the whole energy supply system is a compleeeeetely different level of budgets, complexities, scalability issues and so on.
At least in Germany this was the proposition all along. The idea of „Energiewende“ can be roughly translated to „energy transition“ and it implies that you need to change more than just the form of resource that is powering your energy system. Let’s be real: any other approach has to be labelled „naive“. „The sun doesn’t shine in the night and the wind doesn’t blow every day.“ is not an invention of green energy critics, but was always part of the problem science is trying to solve.
Storage… and transportation
