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posted by martyb on Thursday December 12 2019, @11:51AM   Printer-friendly
from the worlds-first-commercial-electric-beaver dept.

The Guardian is reporting;

The world's first fully electric commercial aircraft has taken its inaugural test flight, taking off from the Canadian city of Vancouver and flying for 15 minutes.

"This proves that commercial aviation in all-electric form can work," said Roei Ganzarski, chief executive of Australian engineering firm magniX.

The company designed the plane's motor and worked in partnership with Harbour Air, which ferries half a million passengers a year between Vancouver, Whistler ski resort and nearby islands and coastal communities.

The recycled 62-year-old de Havilland Beaver seaplane is designed for short hops of 160 km or less, which represents the majority of Harbour Air flights. They're looking to save millions on costly maintenance and downtime. Harbour Air hopes to convert most of their airplanes after certification.


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  • (Score: 0, Troll) by The Shire on Thursday December 12 2019, @06:54PM (1 child)

    by The Shire (5824) on Thursday December 12 2019, @06:54PM (#931483)

    Quite so on the jet fuel, my error, but I think the point was made.

    Vancouver Island has 5 hydro electric dams

    True, but they only produce roughly 4% of the total grids energy needs.

    new batteries are running way over their expected lifetimes, and they can be repurposed or rebuilt

    If you think lead is toxic it's nothing compared to what you will find in the current generation of lithium batteries both during manufacture and recycling.
    https://www.wired.co.uk/article/lithium-batteries-environment-impact [wired.co.uk]

    this is to fill a very specific niche

    From the article: "In Ottawa, transport minister Marc Garneau said ahead of the maiden flight that he had his “fingers crossed that the electric plane will work well”. If it does, he said: “It could set a trend for more environmentally friendly flying.”

    This is meant to be a pilot program (pun intended) to somehow make air traffic more "environmentally friendly" (which is the opposite of what's really occurring).

    it's only 5 trips a day per plane

    The number of planes is irrelevant. It's the total load on electric motors and the aggregate depreciation of the batteries. 72,000 trips by air, which is a very power hungry method of travel, will result in a huge amount of industrial waste. And charging efficiency on those batteries is around 80% meaning that you now have to generate 20% more power using fossil fuels just to keep those batteries topped off. And that efficiency drops along with the age of the batteries so it just gets worse from there.

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  • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday December 12 2019, @07:36PM

    by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Thursday December 12 2019, @07:36PM (#931504) Journal

    This is Canada - not California. BC has tons of hydro power, so there's no need to make a one-to-one equivelace between electricity used and fossil fuels to generate that power.

    Other dams fill most of the rest of the grid. That's why you have hydro towers strung all over the place. And why BC sells surplus power to the US. Same as Quebec.

    People normally don't build urban metropolises in the isolated areas that dams tend to be located in.

    Same as people don't have sprawling pig farms in the centre of major cities.

    As more batteries need to be recycled, businesses will jump in to make money. One of the problems they're having now is that electric car batteries are lasting longer than projected, so they can't operate their facilities at peak efficiency. But that will come. Same as it did for companies that specialize in only rebuilding fork lift batteries, and companies that retread tires for heavy equipment.

    Is an electric airplane that's juiced from hydro power greener than a diesel pickup truck? Looks like it.

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