The unique market research report "Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: Electric UAVs 2014-2024" examines what will be achieved and the enabling technologies that will make it possible.

The event Hybrid and Electric Vehicle Forum consisted a conference with about 70 delegates and a small display area for a few organisations. Here we give some details of the presentations that particularly caught our attention.

The Reed Exhibitions event last week consisting of PV Expo, Battery Osaka and Smart Grid Expo successfully extended an event that started with photovoltaics last year.

Graphene could radically improve batteries and supercapacitors as explained in the new IDTechEx report Functional Materials for Supercapacitors/Ultracapacitors/EDLC 2015-2025.

Water-borne electric vehicles are much more than 100 year old river boats, toy boats on ponds and tiny trolling outboards for leisure fishing. The rapidly increasing military, commercial and industrial applications now dwarf leisure applications in value and sophistication.

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.