Electric Transportation: Current Status vs. Where it Needs to Be

There is a video which shows a $95 million dollar solar plane flying and everyone hails it as some sort of great milestone.

 Unfortunately, these people have set their standards exceptionally low. For price of $95 million dollars, the demonstration plane could seat one person, the pilot, and fly at 43 mph. Technically, it can fly day and night. Oh, and it took seven years to develop. On the contrary, imagine a 747 aircraft which was designed to be super efficient, and used a hybrid engine where the entire surface was coated with 100% efficient solar paint (allowing aesthetically pleasing, low profile, low to no drag, solar generation all over the plane), and battery swap capability in between flights? The electric drive could hopefully power 50% of the Plane. At the very least, it should start out by powering all the plane's internal energy needs like air conditioning, lights, and everything else, working up to powering the entire aircraft later on. Additionally, aircraft could use regenerative aerobraking to help charge the batteries on the descent. From there, renewable algae jet fuel could supply the remaining 50% of the engine's needs. I was pleased to view a video in where Professor Chris Binns of the University of Leicester stated that solar paint could be used in thin film application on airplanes. This helps achieve our goal of in-flight power generation. Keep in mind, airplanes fly ABOVE clouds so all these worries about power generation are moot. That would only apply at night. An interesting concept for electric transportation that seems more realistic is called the VoltAir. It is envisioned that within 25 years that an electric plane could take to the skies that actually makes a difference. Another interesting article is entitled Here Comes the Electric Plane. I have two ideas which can help increase energy efficiency of a plane. Firstly, is utilize any heat from batteries or components that generate heat and convert that into electricity. Secondly, regenerative aerobraking. This is basically regenerative braking, except for an airplane. On the descent, you simply power down and let the plane convert all that energy flowing through the turbines into electricity. I plan on having a more detailed article on electric aviation up in the future which will discuss the proposed elements in greater detail. Items discussed will be...

• Volume of average transportation airliner (to determine how much power solar paint would produce).
• How much fuel does an energy efficient aircraft use? (resource savings)
• Average distance per flight (or flown in a day) [Will determine battery viability and provide important data]
• How much fuel does an average aircraft use?  (average mpg)
• Average energy density of 1 gallon of jet fuel? (Determines how much power will be necessary to fly a plane)
• How much does jet fuel cost annually? (Proves economical or not)