It all comes down to battery technology: Can you make a battery that has enough of an energy/weight ratio to allow a plane to carry a useful payload?
I ran a little workshop that manufactured the batteries for these drones: https://flyzipline.com/
Our 16kg drone carried a ~1.7 kg payload. Of that 16kg aircraft, 9.5 kg of that was the battery - of which ~8 kg was just the Li-ion cells themselves.
For comparison a fuel tank containing the same amount of energy in the form of jet fuel (basically kerosene I think?) would weigh <1kg including the fuel. So, for electric planes to approach the performance of hydrocarbon-burning planes, we must make batteries an order of magnitude better than current tech (well, 2017 tech).
It all comes down to battery technology: Can you make a battery that has enough of an energy/weight ratio to allow a plane to carry a useful payload?
I ran a little workshop that manufactured the batteries for these drones: https://flyzipline.com/
Our 16kg drone carried a ~1.7 kg payload. Of that 16kg aircraft, 9.5 kg of that was the battery - of which ~8 kg was just the Li-ion cells themselves.
For comparison a fuel tank containing the same amount of energy in the form of jet fuel (basically kerosene I think?) would weigh <1kg including the fuel. So, for electric planes to approach the performance of hydrocarbon-burning planes, we must make batteries an order of magnitude better than current tech (well, 2017 tech).