Flying into the Future: Drones of tomorrow
Energy is the largest industry in the world, but transport the fastest growing.
As per Drone Industry Insights, the drone market will grow to be $43 billion by 2024, which is a CAGR of 20.8%. The US and China currently dominate the commercial drone market — together their revenue makes up over 2/3 of the global drone market, but Asia will majorly pull ahead already by the end of 2019, where India being the fastest growing market and will develop into the 3rd largest commercial drone market in the world in 2024.
With this growth rate and increasing market size, the application of drones is conceivable across an array of industries. Right from delivering food, medicines, or parcels to shipping cargoes to drone taxis to inspection jobs in real estate or inaccessible terrains, the possibilities are limitless.
There has been a lot of talk about drones helping reduce the carbon footprints. Let’s explore that further for ourselves.
“[I]n most cases examined, the impacts of package delivery by small drone are lower than ground-based delivery,” the researchers write in a paper published recently in the journal Nature Communications.
“Results suggest that, if carefully deployed, drone-based delivery could reduce greenhouse gas emissions and energy use in the freight sector,” they explain. “To realize the environmental benefits of drone delivery, regulators and firms should focus on minimizing extra warehousing and limiting the size of drones.”
There has been a lot of research going on in battery technology to improve performance while ensuring that batteries are lightweight, compact, and affordable. Innovations and advances are being made in a few of battery types including Lithium-ion, Solid State, Alluminium-ion, Lithium-Sulfur, and Metal-air batteries. Most experts agree that no other chemistry is going disrupt lithium-ion for at least another decade or more.
As per a BCG report on batteries for electric vehicles, here are the tradeoffs between five principal Lithium-ion battery technologies:
Advancements in batteries could not only transform the transportation industry, but they could also significantly affect global energy markets.
According to Sure Dividend, the top 10 drone stocks to watch in 2019 include AeroVironment, Inc. (AVAV), Northrop Grumman Corporation (NOC), Drone Delivery Canada (TAKOF), Kratos Defense & Security Solutions, Inc. (KTOS), Drone Aviation Corp (DRNE), Alphabet Inc. (GOOG), NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA), Lockheed Martin Corporation (LMT), The Boeing Company (BA) and Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN).
In conclusion, the drone market potential is growing at a significant rate. With the pace of improvement in technology, time is not far when we will be able to experience the prevalence of drone in every possible sector like defence, disaster management and relief, rescue and emergency, law enforcement, agriculture, wildlife and anti-poaching, telecommunications, mining, insurance and what not!
