Seems like an eternity we've been hearing/waiting for super capacitors to become a thing. They seem to be the final puzzle piece in EV adoption. Not having to wait hours to "fill up" at the recharging station will be huge.
_Theoretically, these power capacitors could be wrapped up into a big battery pack and used to power a long-range, super fast charging EV. The high-power versions can charge to 75 percent in five minutes, for example. But Verhulst doesn't believe this tech will flood the automotive market. "You need a charger that can handle it," he tells us. "A 10 kWh pack charged in five minutes means you'd need a 100 kW charger. If you then go to the big ones, say a 100 kWh battery, you'd need a megawatt charger. That's a lot. That's a whole power station. So scalability is still an issue."_
Using them in the grid itself is an even bigger aspect, either for simple storage that can act as a peak power plant or to act like a high frequency energy trader.
If these capacitors have lower internal resistance (and it sounds like they do) and last reliably for 10 years... yeah, I can see these being a next generation alternative to battery based storage at the grid level.
If they can manufacture them in a rectangular plate kind of form factor like a cell phone battery, I imagine there could be a huge benefit there. I think people would pay a premium to be able to charge their phone to last for 10 hours in 12 minutes (50C charging rate).
This is exciting. That they're in production and being tested by outside partners is a huge validation point that this is real.
Isn't that why the batteries have active cooling systems?
Mouser and other distributors even have a category for them: https://www.mouser.com/Passive-Components/Capacitors/Superca...
Sort by price descending to see some of the more interesting ones. The cheaper ones are still called supercapacitors but the delineation becomes a little meaningless at that range since regular capacitors have also improved significantly.
Edit: fix link