United Airlines is looking ahead to electrification of its ground operations and potentially charging electric aircraft with a strategic investment in battery producer Natron Energy.
United Airlines Ventures has made several investments focused on reducing emissions from its aircraft fleet but says this is the first to target cutting the greenhouse-gas footprint of the more than 12,000 pieces of motorized ground-support equipment across the airline’s operations.
Santa Clara, California-based Natron is scaling up production of sodium-ion batteries, which offer twice the power output of equivalent-size lithium-ion batteries and a life of more than 50,000 deep-discharge cycles compared with a few thousand.
Sodium-ion batteries are also non-flammable, eliminating the risk of a dangerous thermal runaway that is characteristic of lithium-ion. Too heavy to be used in electric cars, the batteries are suited to stationary power applications such as data centers.
While having too low an energy density to power aircraft, Natron and United are investigating using sodium-ion batteries in ground-support vehicles, which need only short range and operate within the controlled environment of the airport, says Natron CEO Colin Wessells.
“That sodium-ion batteries do not have as high an energy density does not matter because they can recharge very quickly and are very durable,” he notes.
The companies also are looking at using the batteries to recharge future electric aircraft, such as air taxis. Using sodium-ion batteries to store electricity would reduce demands on the power grid. This “peak shaving” would allow multiple aircraft to be recharged simultaneously without conflicting with the airport’s other power needs, avoiding a costly and lengthy upgrade to the airport’s grid connection.
Batteries are already used at many passenger electric-vehicle charging sites, Wessells says, and energy can be extracted from sodium-ion at twice the rate of lithium-ion, reducing the size and cost of buffer batteries installed between the grid and aircraft.
Sodium-ion batteries are produced using existing lithium-ion manufacturing processes. Privately held Natron is shipping commercial batteries for data centers from its pilot plant in Santa Clara. The company plans to begin deliveries from its mass-production factory in Holland, Michigan, in July 2023.
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