Are there denser ways to store electrical energy? Hydrogen fuel cells maybe?
Seems like you need something much lighter than lithium-ion batteries to even begin to fill the role of passenger planes.
Seems like you need something much lighter than lithium-ion batteries to even begin to fill the role of passenger planes.
For all it's faults hydrocarbon fuels are really good at storing energy that's easily extractable.
Cars powered by compressed natural gas take longer to fill than gasoline-powered ones[1]. I can't find it right now, but Edmunds did a long-term test of a natural gas Honda Civic. One of the persistent complaints was long fill times at public high-pressure stations. Natural gas has about 4x the energy density of Hydrogen, so the problem becomes even worse.
The problem with batteries is that a full battery and a discharged one weigh the same.