Electricity in the Air

Some time ago I was reading through the Smithsonian’s Air & Space magazine when I found a small blurb about NASA testing an all-electric airplane. The design wasn’t quite ready yet; there were still issues with the weight and storage limitations of the batteries, which gave the experimental craft a small payload and a very short range, but apparently they were working on the concepts involved. On the plus side, the electric airplane had many of the same advantages than an all-electric car would have had: zero emissions, low engine noise, and the ability to charge directly from renewable energy sources rather than guzzling fossil fuels. I remarked at the time that we were going to need this technology, and more likely sooner rather than later, so I was very interested to see a story on the Reuters site this week about Norwegian authorities testing a two-seat all-electric aircraft…

You can pick up the original story – including some cool video footage of the plane in operation – here if you’d like. Apparently the craft is built by a company called Pipistrel, in Slovenia, and so far hasn’t got either the power or range for more than a few test flights, but both the officials and Alister Doyle at Reuters agree that the concept, at least, has potential. For the moment, the problem is all about energy density. For all of the problems for which they are (justifiably) famous, fossil fuels do have the advantage of containing/storing a relatively large amount of energy in a relatively small mass and volume. Battery technology has improved a great deal in recent years, but a bank of batteries big enough to propel an airplane of any size is still too heavy to get off the ground, and even if it could take off it couldn’t stay up for long…

Project teams at NASA, and apparently several other agencies and companies around the world, are working on smaller, lighter, more-efficient battery designs and also trying to come up with lighter airframes. There has also been some additional work on solar panels; NASA has flown at least one experimental drone that is basically a wing made out of solar cells with a series of small electric motors driving propellers along the leading edge. Called Pathfinder, and built by the same company that build the original Gossamer Penguin solar-powered aircraft, the most recent version can stay in the air for up to 15 hours (depending on day length and other conditions) and may be able to reach altitudes as high as 100,000 feet…

Why does he tell us this? I hear some of you wondering. After all, this is a business blog, and I have no credentials as an aerospace engineer, or even an electromechanical engineer. Because the folks in Norway are talking about introducing an entire fleet of electric-powered aircraft by 2040, with commercial flights potentially starting much sooner. I’ve been speculating for some time that the key technology of this century, or at least the one that will impact consumer products and services the most directly, isn’t going to be electronics or software applications, but rather battery technology. Not because there is any indication that these new energy storage methods are under development, or that I would understand them if they were, but because the demand for such products is growing…

I’m not saying that battery-powered airplanes are going to appear any time soon; unlike the advances we’ve gotten used to seeing in processing power, memory storage, or software sophistication, battery technology will require advances in our understanding of energy density and transmission efficiency, and can’t just be tweaked by hackers in a basement in Menlo Park, or thrown together using stock parts by two rogue geniuses in a garage in Palo Alto. I can’t even tell you where or when the technical breakthroughs are going to happen; as previously noted, none of my degrees are in engineering. But ignoring the potential of this technology over the next few decades would be very much like ignoring the potential of microprocessors, packet-switching software, or microwave telecommunications back in the 1960s…