The battery will have to be reinvented for large planes to become electric, but that's a different discussion. Small planes will be able to ride off the EV battery tech to start the electrification of that whole industry.
Are there any news regarding new, more environment friendly mining processes?
[1] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/lithium-batteries-environmen...
On the other hand, that valley is amazing and should be protected land
Better mining practices are obviously still a good thing, but the environmental impact of lithium mining is pretty small when it comes to Tesla batteries.
"Sensing a chance for a big return, private-equity firms have invested more than $500 million into wastewater-disposal companies such as Solaris Water Midstream LLC, WaterBridge Resources LLC, Goodnight Midstream LLC and Oilfield Water Logistics LLC. There are roughly a dozen of these water-focused companies that analysts said could each be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. ... Some companies have a longer-term plan: recycling the wastewater to sell it back to drillers to reuse."
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-next-big-bet-in-fracking-wa...
"The oil and gas industry is finding that less is more in the push to recycle water used in hydraulic fracturing. Slightly dirty water, it seems, does just as good a job as crystal clear when it comes to making an oil or gas well work. ... Until recently, many companies considered recycling too expensive or worried that using anything other than freshwater would reduce well output. But oil and gas companies are increasingly treating and reusing flowback water from wells, which unlike freshwater is very high in salt, with good results."
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/analysis-fracking...
Where are all these lithium batteries ending up at? Landfills? Many other devices use lithium batteries, namely cellphones.
Lithium batteries from cars and large storage systems will be worth recycling when they are numerous enough. It's unclear if a phone battery will ever be worth recycling.
https://www.engadget.com/2018/12/17/vw-id-range-and-more-inf...
Can this catch up be quantified? There must have been a study of how entire industries ramp up infrastructure and develop economies of scale. This has happened in wartime many, many times, and well resourced countries had an interest in how fast these things could happen. (And how they could be prevented.)
Airplanes are typically "driven" (using positive power) all throughout the flight regime, including descent and approach.
No, not really. Descent in most aircraft is typically done at idle. In jet powered aircraft, final approach will be done with the engines at some speed above idle, but that is to minimize spool-up time during a go-around, rather than because the aircraft needs the thrust.
In jet descents, we rarely get what we prefer which is a slam dunk approach (much more fuel efficient to stay up high). Many times we’re down at 10K feet for 20+ miles because of sequencing. It’s only in the less busy airports where jets can regularly get slam dunk flight idle approaches.
Even there, you probably want to use potential->kinetic rather than potential->chemical->(later) kinetic transfers because of unavoidable losses at each conversion. On the runway, using regen instead of thrust reversers or beta/reverse would be helpful, but that's a vanishingly small part of the overall flight regime.
Wings stall when they exceed their critical angle of attack. A descent is inherently a low AoA maneuver. Heck, in pretty much all aircraft of decent performance, they have devices on the wings to help "spoil" the lift of the wings to help the plane descend more quickly. They're sometimes called speed brakes, sometimes called spoilers.
If you scrub off all your forward speed by turning your propeller/fan into a generator to charge the batteries, you have to push the nose down to maintain AoA.
Went on my first flight in decades last year. The moment we started out descent really stands out to me, I remember the eerie-ness of hearing the engines slow down a ton all of a sudden and no one looking disturbed by it at all.
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How do you think batteries store energy, if not chemically?