Class & Relax Lifestyle Magazine: Is this European delay due to a lack of political support for this new technology? Bertrand Piccard: To a large extent, because there's no point in setting targets if you can't achieve them. Before an industry can be profitable, we know that it needs the support of governments and politicians, because it needs incentives, subsidies and tax exemptions. Europe needs what the Americans are doing so well with the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), an extraordinary incentive for green industry. But in Europe, it's much more complicated because there are 27 countries, with different tax systems and dif- ferent rules. It takes a long time, and Europe has fal- len behind: it absolutely has to pull out all the stops if it doesn't want to become a completely marginali- sed continent. In the hydrogen industry, very sub- stantial incentives are needed to reach critical mass, the point at which demand is sufficient for the price of production to fall. That moment has arrived for solar energy, it has arrived for wind energy, but it hasn't yet arrived for hydrogen. Class & Relax Lifestyle Magazine: At EBACE 2024 in Geneva, Lilium Air Mobility, a company developing electric VTOL jets, aroused your interest. What do you think of this type of aircraft? Bertrand Piccard: Yes, I think that for light aircraft over short distances, the battery is much more effi- cient. When you put electricity into a battery, you recover all of that electricity. If you put electricity into the production of hydrogen, which has to be compressed and liquefied, and then put back into a fuel cell to generate electricity, you lose around 55% of the initial energy. But when it comes to very heavy machines that need more batteries: trains, planes, boats, lorries, for example, then electric batteries use too much energy for their own transport. A plane today would use far too much energy to trans- port its heavy batteries, and that's where hydrogen becomes more interesting again. Class & Relax Lifestyle Magazine: What is the confi- guration of Climate Impulse in terms of hydrogen reserves? Bertrand Piccard: It's a triple fuselage aircraft. The two large fuselages contain the liquid hydrogen tanks and the small one, in the centre, contains the cockpit, two pilots and enough to fly for 9 days. The hydrogen will be green hydrogen, produced by elec- trolysis of water using renewable energies. It has to be kept at - 423 °F : we're very close to absolute zero, which requires revolutionary, extremely well-
insulated tanks to keep the hydrogen liquid for the 9 days of flight. Volume is important, not weight. What's interesting is that with a wingspan of 34 metres, like an Airbus A320, and around a tonne and a half of liquid hydrogen, Climate Impulse will fly for nine days with two people: that's the same amount of hydrogen as it would take to fly an Airbus A320 with 150 passengers on a medium-haul flight.
With Klaus Rœwe, CEO of Lilium Air Mobility, at EBACE Geneva .
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~B O R N T O B E A B I R D - 2024 ~
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