SiC devices will be widely designed into electric vehicles from 2014 and GaN from 2018. With manufacturers currently designing vehicles to be launched onto the market in 2018, it is predicted that by this date GaN semiconductors will attain price parity with silicon devices. This will make the technology attractive as a replacement for silicon for use in the power electronics in both pure electric and hybrid vehicles.

IDTechEx's Supercapacitor Europe 2014 conference is bringing the best of supercapacitor developments in the region and internationally to Berlin on 1-2 April.

The worldwide interest in waste heat recovery continues to grow, with a wide range of applications ranging from small harvesters integrated into wireless sensor networks all the way to larger harvesters such as the ones that can potentially be integrated into cars.

The new IDTechEx report, Electric Boats, Small Submarines and Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV) 2014-2024 reveals the market for electric water craft, including those on and under water, will increase from $2.6 billion to $7.3 billion in 2024.

The supercapacitor industry closed last year (2013) with a continued double-digit growth. According to Maxwell Technologies' executives, China has been the main source of growth. New announcements confirm what IDTechEx has stated in recent years: the supercapacitor and the battery industry are the same.

The total market value for electric unmanned aerial vehicles will reach over one Billion dollars by 2023 according to findings in the new IDTechEx report, "Electric Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) 2013-2023"

The total global gross value market for hybrid and pure electric vehicles will reach US$334 billion within the decade, from a current value of US$69 billion, forecast analysts IDTechEx.

As the electric vehicle EV industry grows more than five-fold to well over $300 billion in 2024, those e-vehicles not bought primarily on up-front price will continue to dominate.

Analysts IDTechEx have recently pointed out that industrial and commercial electric vehicles (hybrid and pure electric) are now a bigger business than electric cars and will remain so for the coming decade, while making almost all the profit of the two put together.

A Tesla Model S was filmed burning in the road recently, allegedly having struck a metal object.

Supercapacitors are increasing the range of electric vehicles in several ways and by doing so they are hugely increasing the addressable market for those vehicles. Typically, they last for the life of the vehicle regardless of how many cycles are endured.

The Japanese are working very hard on thermoelectric energy harvesting from tiny forms for use on hot running electronics components the 1.5 kW versions for use on furnace flues etc.

For the next decade, the largest electric vehicle sector will be industrial and commercial electric vehicles on land. In great contrast to the hybrid and pure electric cars that come next in market size, industrial and commercial electric vehicles are almost never bought by private individuals. That means that they are almost never bought on up-front price, the criteria being cost-over-life, reliability and performance with any extra life over conventional versions much appreciated.

This article shares some of the research in the new IDTechEx report, "Range Extenders for Electric Vehicles Land, Water & Air 2013-2023" which covers all such vehicles, on land, on/under water and airborne.

Life is good for supercapacitors manufacturers and developers.

In this article we will briefly look at implementations in the rail transit sector, and the kind of technologies that are making their way onto trains, railways and waysides in order to reduce power consumption, maintenance costs and reliability of train services.

The market for electric taxis will be a huge 345,000 vehicles in 2017, surpassing $10 billion in business as early as 2019 as forecasted by new IDTechEx research in its recently published report, Hybrid and Electric Buses and Taxis 2013-2023: Forecasts, Opportunities, Players.

IDTechEx projects that 119,000 electric taxis will be sold giving a $1.8 billion global market. Most of the commercial electric vehicles, including the taxis, are and will be pure electric. That will even be true of large commercial vehicles, notably e-buses, set to exceed a $20 billion market as early as 2018 and dominated by demand in China.

IDTechEx find that pure electric car sales in 2013 will be 70,000 vehicles rising to 2 million in 2023, versus 2 million hybrid vehicles this year rising to 7.6 million in 2023.

Questions arise as to how much supercapacitors can improve if organisations more like NASA took over. After all, if supercapacitors can replace many batteries when, as today, they store one tenth of their energy, what will happen in the marketplace if they approach the theoretical ten times the lithium-ion battery figure while acting as a near-perfect "battery"?