Comment by abdullahkhalids
20 hours ago
An A320 can store 24k liters of fuel. Jet fuel stores 35 MJ/L. So, the plane carries 8.4E11 J of energy. If that was stored in a battery that had to be charged in an hour 0.23GW of electric power would be required.
So indeed, an airport serving dozens or hundreds of electric aircrafts a day will need obscene amounts of electric energy.
Jet engines are not 100% efficient.
Electric motors can be pretty close, 98% is realistic. Of course other parts of the system will lose energy, like conversion losses.
Of course that doesn't mean batteries are currently a viable replacement. One should still take efficiency into account in quick back of the envelope calculations.
Halve it to 0.11G then.
It makes no difference, we’d still need gigawatt scale electricity production, with some multiple of that at peak, just for a fairly unremarkable airport.