by ChuckMcM | 2025-04-18 21:26:29+00:00
Was going to post something similar. I love me a screed where the author rails against some group saying they don't know what they are talking about, and then goes on to demonstrate that they don't know what they are talking about. :-)

For a long time I didn't understand what 'talking past each other' meant but this article is a good example of that. Mostly it's bad form to make sweeping generalizations. But let's be specific;

From the article, here is the "TL;DR" --

Lithium propulsion for aircraft and boats is fundamentally unprofitable across the entire U.S. grid. The numbers don't lie: 60× worse energy density than jet fuel, 3.3× higher operating costs, 22% reduced asset utilization, and payback periods that consume 2/3 of the asset's lifespan. Anyone claiming otherwise is ignoring basic physics or hiding most of the energy and economic costs.

So first let's talk definitions. "profit" is, by definition, "gross revenue" - "costs". "costs" come in two flavors, "direct", "marginal", and "operational". Direct costs are what you pay, every time for the thing you need. Marginal cost is what you pay for just "a bit more" of the thing you need. And operational costs are the costs you pay so that you can operate your business.

So there is a direct cost of a lithium battery which is included in the manufacturing of a widget, there is the marginal cost of charging that battery up to full capacity, and there is the operational cost of maintaining the battery and presumably repairing or replacing it, when it doesn't do what you ask of it any more.

There is a fourth cost, which is "externalities", that covers the cost of remediating the environmental damage which is done by your energy source and while important, and the focus of climate change awareness, its rarely considered in the discussion of 'profitable' vs. 'unprofitable.'

If we keep this discussion on "lithium" which is the "gas" of these transportation modalities. You can say that building a battery pack is much more expensive than building a gas tank. So cost wise a gas is cheaper. The marginal cost of energy in Watts between gasoline and electricity leans heavily in electric's favor for a number of reasons. The operational costs of fueling and maintaining the "source power" for electric cars nominally similar.

But all of that, has to be put into the context of the system cost which includes vehicle fabrication, power 'converters' (aka motors) that turn fuel into motion, and mechanical maintenance.

Then you jump into a bigger frame of reference and consider all transportation modalities and how they combine as a system to get someone from point A to point B, and what are the costs of building, expanding, and operating that?

The author doesn't see a path between 'here' and what they know to 'there' where Lithium batteries have "improved" non-vehicle transportation modalities over what fossil fuels can do. That's fair, I don't see one either precisely, but there are interesting paths to explore. Foreclosing one's thinking to possibilities on those paths is not usually the right thing to do. A better strategy is to think about it in terms of what would have to be true in order for these paths to be viable updates to the way we travel/ship/transport.