I know this article is from bmw but afaik people are interested in hydrogen for other types of vehicles than cars. Ships, for instance. Forklifts. Trains.
Planes will never work well due to hydrogens low energy-to-volume ratio, unfortunately.
Planes will never work well due to hydrogens low energy-to-volume ratio, unfortunately.
But the same tech is necessary for carbon neutral food production anyway. Today's agriculture is fully dependant on fossil fuel energy, both for running the machines and for creating the many inputs like fertilizers and pesticides.
And there is a significant amount of potential optimization left.
Using the batteries as load structures is just one of them, that significantly changes the simplified calculation people do on density. There are many other ideas. The problem is a lot of investment and engineering is needed and to get a passenger plane threw the regulatory process, specially something as new as E-Plane is a gigantic project.
In the future battery tech will get significantly better in the next 10 years and rethinking the plane from the ground up with that technology in mind will do the trick and beat hydrogen.
I think a 30 person plane that can cover the most common routes in populated regions would beat any jet fueled airline in terms of cost.