3. Current and future technological issues and challenges

3.1 The challenges

In practice, all-electric aircraft are limited to a light category with limited range. Apart from economic considerations, current technologies can meet the needs of very light aircraft, but their performance is still too low to allow commercialization (except for APUs, which are a notable special case).

To power larger aircraft, a significant improvement in energy storage technologies is expected. Compared with current performance levels, these should be able to develop at least 5 times more specific energy. More realistically, a factor of 10 would become commercially attractive for regional aircraft