BAE Systems and Embraer say they will explore potential defence variants for the Eve eVTOL aircraft.
In a news release received by the UK Defence Journal this morning, BAE Systems and Embraer Defense & Security have announced plans to embark on a joint study to explore the development of Eve’s electric Vertical Take Off and Landing (eVTOL) vehicle for the defence and security market.
“The joint study builds on Eve’s development for the urban air mobility market and will look at how the aircraft could provide cost-effective, sustainable and adaptable capability as a defence variant. Engineers from BAE Systems’ Air sector in Lancashire, UK, will work together with the Embraer Defense & Security team based in São José dos Campos, Brazil to explore how a defence variant could be used for a range of applications such as personnel transportation, surveillance and reconnaissance, disaster relief and humanitarian response.
Eve’s eVTOL could help to transform defence operations, whilst reducing their environmental impact – at a much lower operating cost than today’s platforms.”
Jackson Schneider, president and CEO, Embraer Defense & Security, was quoted as saying:
“This collaboration with one of the leading defence companies in the world on this exciting and game-changing technology is in line with our goal to establish strategic partnerships. We look forward to exploring more ways our two organisations can work together and benefit from those rich experiences and reputations. The collaboration allows us to tap into talent from across the globe in our shared interest to develop innovative and sustainable solutions for the skies.”
Ian Muldowney, Chief Operating Officer, BAE Systems Air sector, said:
“Bringing together Embraer’s innovative technology in the commercial sector with our extensive defence engineering and systems integration experience will help us to accelerate the pace of new innovations. This joint study is a great example of how we’re delivering against our commitment to collaborate to explore new and sustainable technologies for our customers.”
The all-electric aircraft is part of Embraer’s commitment towards more sustainable aviation and has come out of Eve, an independent company dedicated to accelerating the global Urban Air Mobility (UAM) ecosystem.
I’m fascinated. As we move from fossil fuels to renewables – can we really generate enough electricity without nuclear?
No. Not currently. Need new nuclear and small nuclear online ASAP until fusion comes along.
Renewable energy is not currently mature nor consistent to provide all our needs. That is not excusing the lack of 3nergy efficiency we have in the UK. How much balance of trade payments / emissions, could we reduce if insulated all the hard to heat homes rather than just on benefits? How much could we improve if suv’s weren’t fashionable etc
Politics – I’d like Defence to have an inflation adjusted budget of 3% GDP wirh a vote of 95% to change it; equally, future energy needs a similar deal.
Now, how to keep the NHS truly public but strip costs to pay for everything else.
Do you have a good envelope?
Mike, how about insulating low income homes, save fuel & improve lives. think the germans committed an eco crime by turning off their nuclear power stations and now need Putin’s gas line.
I would insulate ALL homes. Those on benefits can normally get assistance whilst thise with slightly different circumstances, even on lower household income, might be living in the same style hone but as not receiving any benefit they don’t qualify for assistance. Cost of insulating all homes will be offset by reduction in importing energy.
Agree re Germany commuting eco disaster by turning off nuclear as they moved to Putins gas or local brown (really nasty( coal
Agree about the German Nuclear shutdown. Complete overreaction to the Japanese disaster. The lesson from that should have been-don’t build these plants in highly unstable environments such as Japan where big Earthquakes are a certainty
Hi Geoff the problem is that there are not that many nuclear piles in the world ( compared to other power stations) and they have had a low but steady rate of catastrophic failures for a number of reasons.
Now A big part of my job is to look at safety within complex and chaotic systems and I know one thing. Even the best constructed systems fail and you must aways ask yourself are you willing to take the consequences of that failure.
One thing that is always a challenge in my line of work ( to get people to properly consider the risk of catastrophic outcomes and if they are willing to accept the outcome of if it happens) is that people cannot believe that the catastrophic outcome will come to pass ( even if it’s happened before).
The other big part of my job is to investigate why complex system fail catastrophically and one thing comes up again and again. If there is a human involved it will fail, be that in the building, oversight or doing a task, humans always always fail and sometimes that failure kills many hundreds or thousands.
finally we never ever know what nature will do, all our nuclear reactors are by the sea. The seas are chaos theory incarnate. You never know when a once in the thousands year storm surge will occur or a geological event thousands of miles away creates a tidal wave ( yes they do happen in the Atlantic as well).
that is why I cannot trust nuclear fission, it has failed catastrophically and will fail again, to lose thousands of square miles to exclusion zones is not something our small island is really built to take.
But and this is important I’m one of life’s professional pessimists, I’ve been created as such, sometimes the risks I see are realised ( just read my posts on Sars- Cov 2 from 2 years ago) and sometimes they never happen…..But the risks aways exist, never doubt.
Hi Jonathan. Wow-if you are involved in looking at the possibilities that follow Nuclear plant failures then no wonder you are pessimistic! Also agree there is no proper long term solution to Nuclear waste-in real terms it is ‘Forever’. Perhaps a half way station as with the small RR nuclear systems-hedging benefit against risk must be easier there? Also ,even how advanced artificial intelligence becomes and how near perfect are robots, they will never have that extraordinary flexibility that the human mind posseses but as you say, humans fail and that will always be an inalienable truth.
Hi Geoff, lucky for me I get to look at failures of healthcare systems and providers. But as all industries share what we call “human factors”, learning, control systems, risk management as well a things like the study of special and common cause variations we tend to share learning and study failures across different complex systems and fields ( so I pay as much attention to what learning I can get from Hinckley, shipping disasters and aviation ect as I do from cases like shipman or the management of covid outbreaks).
The thing is as you noted the human factor can be a benefit or the major cause of failure…. that intuitive ability to assess and react to massively complex situations (intuition is actually a specific type of intelligence built of the ability to subconsciously weave knowledge and experience into a decision). But the human is also almost always the Failure point in a system as well. The secret is to keep the human intuition and ability to manage complexity heuristically ( the human brain is the best heuristic decision making tool on the plant), but put in systems that prevent the things we know impact on the human brain and force it down poor decision making: personal experience ( it’s not happened to me before so..) overburden ( to much input in one go), underburden ( getting bored and distracted) stress response ( fight or flight leads to inappropriate decisions), lack of power ( if we think we are not allowed to make a decision humans tend not to) shared culture ( we are social animals and if our colleagues do somthing wrong we tend to follow, and start to all do the same things wrong).
Hi Mike that’s not entirely true, we are one nation that could under present technology be 100% supplied by green energy. We have 31,000km of coastline which is just one great big energy supply. Wave energy density is around 30kw per meter of wave. It’s more a lack of bravery that has held back wave power as it’s basically pretty basic with around five mechanical ways of waves driving a turbine ( it’s not rocket science like solar or fusion).
Tidal barrages are very old tec and a great way to go ( you can have some environmental impact, but better a silty estuaries than a dead plant I say).
Due to the shape of our coast and size of our tides ( we have some of the biggest tides in the world, with a great coastline for building barrages) it be a particularly good way to go and very proven tec, the french have been running a major barrage power station for 50 years, with other nations following. They are also cheaper than nuclear at about 10p per kWh and run for so long that capital costs are managed away very early I. The barrages life. The U.K. had an option to go with a barrage across the severn, that would have suppled about 17TWh per year ( 6% of our energy needs).
Nuclear fission is in reality just to problematic and high risk for a nation like the U.K. to keep depending on it. Nuclear power stations do suffer catastrophic failures. In a large land mass nation like Russia or the US it can be managed. If the U.K. has a catastrophic failure we are in buggered vile, due to prevailing winds, land mass and the number of key transport links that would be severed. We also don’t have way to manage our intermediate radioactive waste, which is a large part of our nuclear waste production as the U.K. still can’t find an appropriate site with the correct geology.
personally I would like to our nuclear capital investment in fission reactors paused because it’s very likely a dead end last generation technology ( we are on generation 3 and I’m not a believer that we will get to generation 4 on the 2030s due to leaps in fusion). Fission was only ever a stop gap before we got fusion and a requirement for a nuclear weapons programme.we are literally only a few years away from commercial fusion which is the future.
I think as a nation we need to focus on a mix of high tec fusion, off shore wind and tidal barrage On shore wind is just a bit unreliable and solar should be limited to micro generation on roofs and not on taking up valuable food growing land in the U.K.
during the Great Depression the US built it’s self out of depression with great civil engineering projects designed to last for generations, like the hover dam. Coming out of covid we should be building a set of great tidal barrages that could supply our nation with cheap clean power for generations to come and support the British economy and tec base.
Assuming ITER goes as planned without any hitches, it’s 2048 before it’s successor DEMO is scheduled to demonstrate commercial electricity generation. Given the delays experiences so far, 2048 would seem optimistic.
Using current technology for generating electricity from wave and tidal sources the cost is 3 times that of offshore wind. Solar is also a more cost-effective form. This is why there there has been little investment in this area.
(Not overlooking the huge environmental impact of giant tidal barrages.)
SMRs offer the best hope for meeting the energy gap between renewables and the UK’s requirements. The large fission plants planned, despite using mature designs, have the inherent risk of large complex engineering projects. By comparison Rolls Royce has experience of producing small reactors thanks to the Royal Navy’s SSN and SSBNs.
Hi Sean. The one major problem with large scale generation of solar power in the crowded UK as Jonathan points out, is the loss to agriculture of the land required. However here in Durban the local MAN plant(the German heavy truck MAN) generates virtually its entire needs from roof top panels fitted to every square metre of their extensive factory footprint. Now there is a solution to the loss of space elsewhere-basically no additional room required. Obviously better suited to new construction where monopitch roofs can be constructed on buildings to face due South(North here😉)
Hi Geoff, yes that should be the way forward for solar, smaller sub commercial generation using the dead space on roof tops etc.
Clearly some parts of the world have the right environment for commercial solar. Especially if the area is not much use for any other purpose ( desert etc).
Hi Sean, interesting on the small nuclear reactor, to be honest I’ve not explored the safety/risk case around them in the same way I have with large commercial reactors, so I can’t comment on that.
With tidal, barrage generators tend to come in very cheap per KWh compared to other “clean energy”. But they have a large capital cost, so a nation needs to look at cost over lifetime. Look at the business case and longer term envoromental impact studies around the La Rance barrier, it’s in it 50th decade, produces very cheap clean power ( at around 10p KWh) and has actually increased bio diversity around the La Rance estuary.
Our government used the “ we don’t know what the envormental impact would be” would be as they simply would not support the capital costs of a project that would reap cheap power decades in the future, it’s the same with our power generation companies who want low capital investment projects to make money soon over longer term generational benefit projects. They were supported by a specific group of environmental activist who want nothing to change in our environment forgetting that there is nothing wrong with beneficial Change that improves diversity. I’m as green as they come and I say hell yes stick up those Barrages.
Hi Jonathan, the UK government rejected tidal barrages in Swansea Bay a couple of years ago because the Levelised Cost of Electricity (LCOE) was nowhere near competitive on the UK grid, and that accounts for it’s whole lifecycle cost. From memory it was around £120/MWh which is well beyond even Hinkley at £92.50.
From an environmental point of view I have no issue with the idea of tidal lagoons (if they can be built economically), but a barrage across the entire Severn Estuary impacts a massive ecosystem when compared to the size of La Rance. It is also a rare ecosystem in the UK that cannot be replicated elsewhere, so would cause significant damage that couldn’t be mitigated.
The final point i’ll make on tidal and offshore wind, the UK cannot base its grid on these technologies as it currently stands. Wind is unreliable and tidal, whilst reliable, generates at very set times, making it impossible to respond to grid demands. There is no storage technology that can balance a grid the size of the UK’s that is either technologically or commercially feasible. This has all been shown by government modelling, which has repeatedly concluded that the only way to do it is to include nuclear in the mix.
We cannot currently be supplied with 100% green energy 100% of the time, and that’s all that matters.
We also have no more capacity to store renewable energy using reservoirs, unless you want to fight people over flooding their valleys.
Batteries (chemical and hydrogen) are and will be used to store excess generation, but the scale needed to support an entire country wholly is not really viable.
And that’s not even taking into account future electricity demands if more things go electric (or hydrogen – also requiring electricity). Fossil fuels are incredibly energy dense, so that’s an awful lot of electricity that would be needed.
And those demands can only be met with nuclear in the energy generation mix.
Hi Tams
The point is we cannot produce 100% green power all the time, because we have not created the generating or storage capacity.
We can if we wanted to make the capital expenditures. But government does not like making capital expenditures that don’t pay off in term and power companies need a profit now, not in 2 decades.
tidal power is completely predictable and reliable( baring catastrophic failure). So we would know exactly what power we could get at anyone time from any barrages and tidal stations we built.
local solar ( on roofs) again is reliable in the extent that you always know your min max.
onshore wind is so unreliable as to be a bit piontless. Offshore wind is more reliable and could be linked to the same infrastructure/ power distribution as tidal.
We can generate a whole lot more power through digesters and management of waste.
finally and this is the big one. Electric cars are potentially our way to manage power generation spikes, each car is just a huge battery that spends most of its time parked up. These can be used to smooth out any power generation issues.
So with power it’s not about cannot it’s more would not. For some countries that are now dependent on fossil fuels from authoritarian states that would not is look like a big old problem.
Great post Jonathan. There is as I am sure you know, a tidal power generator in County Down NI near Donaghadee where my cousin resides(also has one of the oldest ports and pubs in the UK) 😉
With current technology, I doubt it. Hence the importance of RR’s small modular reactors……
I don’t but into that – where I reside at the moment is a favoured location for a nuclear waste repository – now if the Mendips and Chilterns would take one each, I’m sure people would acquiesce but somehow, not sure they would.
Morning David. Yes the nuclear waste issue is a problem that won’t go away-again especially in the crowded UK. I think the perfect illustration of this is the lines of decommissioned nuclear subs stacking up in Scotland. The Americans have their huge Desert facility and again here in SA we have vast open spaces in the Northern Cape that would do waste and solar panels. What of the logistics of shipping to say Ascension-the island is virtually uninhabited and with a trashed environment with almost all of its indigenous vegetation long gone. Would be ideal
This is indeed a fascinating subject. On the subject of your generation question. The short answer is no.
I read a report a couple of years ago by an engineering professor and green energy advocate, who set out to take an honest look at the future of energy generation in the UK. I’ll see if I can find a link, it was very interesting.
One thing that stuck out for me was that he said we could put one wind turbine on every square mile of the UK mainland and still not meet baseload requirements for the whole country. While renewables have an important part to play, they cannot meet current requirements with current technology without an impractically massive investment, if I recall correctly it was of the order of a trillion of pounds – if we wanted an entirely renewable energy generation capacity.
Carbon neutral energy generation is entirely within our grasp but not without the use of nuclear energy. The Rolls Royce SMR project holds great promise, hopefully this can take off and the UK can be a world leader in this field.
The problem is the disposal – requisition the Falkland Islands to take one for the Team?
Wrong island David!! Ascension would be perfect.
I wonder what the grown ups think? How long has the nuclear sub decommissioning exercise been going on?
I vote for the Isle of Wight.
😳I am sure you would have overwhelming support from the Wightians Jonathan😂
We would pay them a sort of “ fucked up your island” payment obvs. Keep them in 🍺🍺 so they don’t notice all the ☠️☠️ Signs.
Iceland gets all its electricity by Geo Thermal, currently there is no such power station in the U.K., but that said one is set to start generating power in Redruth anytime now. interestingly the project started with £1.4 grant from the Government , which was followed by a grant in 2011 by the EU for £6 million, which they took back after the project couldn’t find a originate company to back them. In 2017 they crowdfunded the project to a tune of £4 Million which they achieved after a fortnight. Personally I feel there is a huge potential for the U.K. across the U.K. for this type of clean energy.
Do we actually have any ‘geysers’ ? I spoke with a developer in Latvia and he said heat pumps were great for 5 years but then packed up… I’m not an engineer… and to be dug out and replaced.
He actually spent a shoite load on self contained insulated housing as he believed that was the way forward.
Nearest we have is probably Bath, but the water there varies from ~70-90 degrees C. Not really hot enough for geothermal power generation, at least at the surface anyway.
Geothermal was tried in Southampton some decades ago via a borehole. It was close to the station I think…
Geothermal power is great if your territory happens to have the required thermal gradient below ground. We have it in a few places such as Redruth, as mentioned above, but Iceland has a much higher geothermal potential owing to it’s fairly unique geology. A lower thermal gradient requires the water circulation systems to be buried much deeper before temperatures greater than boiling point can be reached whereas for many places in Iceland its relatively near the surface.
Yes, there is a vast amount of wind solar and hydro energy. Many times the amount that we could ever need. It is estimated that offshore wind power alone has the potential to supply 18 times the current world power usage with current technology
Is that taking into account people refusing power generation in their area (and the local MP backing them up to keep their votes), and the drastic increase in demand for electricity that shifting from fossil fuels would cause?
As far as I am aware that figure is based on global electricity demand. So it includes fossil fuel powered generation. Obviously demand will increase with the move to electric transportation however not by as much as you may think (mainly due to the massive increase in efficiency that electric transport enjoys). National Grid did a study into future generation needs and found that if everyone in the UK swapped to an EV overnight then we would need just a 10% increase in generation capacity… So it is safe to say that there is plenty of wind power potential available to cover it all… Not only that but there is also extraordinary amounts of solar potential not to mention hydro and geothermal. Then there is Nuclear Fusion as we are getting closer and closer to cracking the problems with that technology.
People! Thank you so much for replying and an incredibly interesting topic – which you guys have opened up with your replies.
I do love a good conversation around green energy and nuclear power, I’m so sad really.
Enough grown ups have replied bud – engage with them.
I would like to see any of these aircraft properly tested rather than telling us what they will be able to do. Build a full sized one and let’s see what it can do!
There’s a few 40mm cannons and turrets knocking about we can glue on the bugger!
BAE are good at glueing stuff together. We should ask them.
Just looking at the hypothetical specs. 1000 kilo MTOW. 240 Kph (150mph) 96 km (60 mile) range. Compare that to a Robinson R66 which has a similar passenger capacity. MTOW 1225 kilo, similar speed, 650km (350 mile range). Other than short range air taxi I can’t see much use for it given the range restrictions.
Also the nagging doubt-the image of an electric car being recharged from a station via a Diesel generator!!! But of course here in SA(sorry to keep punting the local) we have a large hydro power complex in the Drakensberg mountain area whereby water gravitated down from the Sterkfontein dam supplies energy and in the off peak period is pumped back up again to continue the cycle. I know it sounds counter intuitive-no such thing as a perpetual motion machine, but it uses surplus electricity that would otherwise be wasted. My description is crude but I am sure Google can give you the full picture.
Some electric car actually have petrol engines to recharge the batteries….. always considered that a bit shall we say um odd.
i have enough Charge worry, driving to the supermarket and back and my feet don’t leave the ground. Man-Made fuels better option