The Fuel Tank of Tomorrow - A Super Capacitor? - YouTube
If the super cap battery becomes a reality it could be a game changer for EV adoption. A 30 second recharge time would overcome the problem of recharging time today.
I got 2/3rds thought the video and had enough. Slick talker avoided the issues. The key problem with energy storage in capacitors is self-discharge. Means you have to use a fair amount of power to keep the capacitor charged. Its the same sort of thing as "all that gasoline wasted in inefficient waste heat."
Capacitors are great in that there is no chemical reaction to age. The issue with chemical reactions is that they don't perfectly go forward and backward to where they were, which ultimately limits cycle life with decreasing capacity.
Do you have any concept as to how much current a 30 second charge would require? Lets say an interesting 100kWh battery at 1000V? At 100% efficiency: 12,000A. Or 24,000A if only 500V. A 10kV battery would only require 1,200A! And all this time I marvel at how Tesla lets untrained unlicensed idiots make 120kW (400V 300A) connections to their vehicles.
Now lets consider the 30 second charge is 99% efficient. That means there will be 1kWh of heat, in 30 seconds. Imagine a common electric space heater, those are 1kW to 1.5kW. Now consider an hour of heat but in only 30 seconds. 120 times greater. Not good news.
Observe our slick talker claimed his supercapacitor could discharge from full to zero in 1 second,
and claimed this to be a safety future. Lithium technology is much slower than that, but still fast enough to be banned from airlines.