Image by Ritu Rawat
By Jo Nova
It’s just another wake up call in the Green fairy fantasy land
It’s a nice idea to think we can store electricity in liquid fuels and effectively run our planes on wind or solar power, but the numbers are not your friend. The chief of Europe’s second largest airline presumably thought it was time to remind our planetary saviors that aviation really needs Avgas. There is no realistic option to decarbonize flights.
German airline Lufthansa says it would consume half of Germany’s electricity if it were to switch to green fuels
By Prarthana Prakash, Fortune
…while Lufthansa has tried to do its bit to adopt sustainable practices, the company’s chief says that switching the airline to green fuels like e-kerosene could come at a big price—half of Germany’s electricity supply.
“We would need around half of Germany’s electricity to create enough of the fuels,” Lufthansa’s Carsten Spohr said at an aviation conference Monday, Bloomberg reported. He added that while green fuels made using renewable energy sources would help Lufthansa decarbonize its fuel consumption, the likelihood of having enough electricity to produce such materials was low.
Essentially, to decarbonize Lufthansa about 30 million people would have to live in the dark. And we’re only talking of decarbonizing the flights, not the manufacturing of planes, runways and airports.
Carsten Spohr also pointed out that Lufthansa was “among the biggest buyers of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF)”, but there just wasn’t enough in existence, even if passengers were willing to pay for it.
“If the Lufthansa Group were to use all the SAF currently available, it would only be able to fly for just under two weeks.”
Only a few months ago, the experts announced that the lifespan of electric plane batteries was “only a few weeks” pouring more doom on the idea that planes can be “NetZero”. France announced that instead of short flights, people would have to catch the train (unless they owned a private jet, in which case it was fine).
Avgas is God’s gift to the masses.