Preface. I wonder if Bill Gates has read my book “When Trucks Stop Running”? As he says in the article below: “The renaissance of electrification that we’re seeing in passenger vehicles unfortunately won’t likely adapted to heavier forms of transportation — such as airplanes, cargo ships and semi tractor trailers — in the foreseeable future. Today’s batteries simply can’t hold enough power to sufficiently offset their weight and bulk.”

Then a bunch of nonsense as well (not shown) with the worst recommendation at the end: “We need a massive effort to explore all the ways we can make advanced biofuels and cheap electrofuels. Companies and researchers are exploring several different pathways—for example, new ways to make hydrogen using electricity, or using solar power, or using microbes that naturally produce hydrogen as a by-product. The more we explore, the more opportunities we’ll create for breakthroughs.”

No Bill, no! Hydrogen won’t work, it is the stupidest of all the energy salvation proposals out there, solar PV is not an option, and biofuels have a negative energy return, don’t scale up, and would destroy ecosystems.

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com  Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.  Women in ecology  Podcasts: WGBH, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity,  Index of best energyskeptic posts

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Tarantola A. 2021. Hitting the Books: Bill Gates on why we can’t have electric airplanes. Or long-haul cargo ships, for that matter. Engadget.

Not long ago, my friend Warren Buffett and I were talking about how the world might decarbonize airplanes. Warren asked, “Why can’t we run a jumbo jet on batteries?” He already knew that when a jet takes off, the fuel it’s carrying accounts for 20 to 40% of its weight. So when I told him this startling fact — that you’d need 35 times more batteries by weight to get the same energy as jet fuel — he understood immediately. The more power you need, the heavier your plane gets. At some point, it’s so heavy that it can’t get off the ground. Warren smiled, nodded, and just said, “Ah.”

The renaissance of electrification that we’re seeing in passenger vehicles unfortunately won’t likely adapted to heavier forms of transportation — such as airplanes, cargo ships and semi tractor trailers — in the foreseeable future. Today’s batteries simply can’t hold enough power to sufficiently offset their weight and bulk.

When you’re trying to power something as heavy as a container ship or jetliner, the rule of thumb I mentioned earlier — the bigger the vehicle you want to move, and the farther you want to drive it without recharging, the harder it’ll be to use electricity as your power source—becomes a law. Barring some unlikely breakthrough, batteries will never be light and powerful enough to move planes and ships anything more than short distances.

Consider where the state of the art is today. The best all-electric plane on the market can carry two passengers, reach a top speed of 210 miles per hour, and fly for three hours before recharging. Meanwhile, a mid-capacity Boeing 787 can carry 296 passengers, reach up to 650 miles an hour, and fly for nearly 20 hours before stopping for fuel. In other words, a fossil-fuel-powered jetliner can fly more than three times as fast, for six times as long, and carry nearly 150 times as many people as the best electric plane on the Market.

Batteries are getting better, but it’s hard to see how they’ll ever close this gap. If we’re lucky, they may become up to three times as energy dense as they are now, in which case they would still be 12 times less energy dense than gas or jet fuel.

The same goes for cargo ships. The best conventional container ships can carry 200 times more cargo than either of the two electric ships now in operation, and they can run routes that are 400 times longer. Those are major advantages for ships that need to cross entire oceans.

Given how important container ships have become in the global economy, I don’t think it will ever be financially viable to try to run them on anything other than liquid fuels. Unfortunately, the fuel that container ships run on — it’s called bunker fuel — is dirt cheap, because it’s made from the dregs of the oil refining process. Since their current fuel is so inexpensive, the Green Premium for ships is very high.