Following on from my post from a few days ago "Can supercapacitors close the lithium ion performance gap?" a great tour de force in this week's Economist magazine (why do their editorial staff insist on calling it a newspaper? So pretentious!) - about the rise of the ultracapacitor in energy storage. It's well worth a read for the technical detail and for an overview of who's doing what.

I hadn't heard before of the XH-150 - pictured here -
a 3 way hybrid employing a petrol engine, conventional lithium-ion  batteries and ultracapacitors, made by AFS Trinity.

What this article misses though and makes me wonder, is all the hype that was created by the Lightning Car Company
and their planned use of high performance altairnano fast recharge lithium ion batteries. Read all about it here. As they are due to deliver their cars starting this year, you wonder why there isn't more excitement about the coming launch?

I suspect there's already a degree of ennui, mostly unfair, about this sector. It's not helped by the fact that heretofore, there are more than a few players, promising lots and delivering little, much like any new industry. So as this becomes apparent, expect plenty of fallout and rationalisation. After all, in the 1920s, there were 1000s of vehicle manufacturers, now only a few - see the talk here I organised by Professor Garel Rhys CBE, the leading global academic authority on the motor industry on pages 3-9 of this pdf last year, on 21st Century Motor Industry Economics.

Meanwhile, Altairnano's technology still has a lot going for it. The relatively low energy density of batteries appears to be not quite the obstacle everyone thought it was. It's much more to do with recharge times, number of potential charge/discharge cycles and of course cost. And these metrics are all showing far better year on year improvement metrics than energy density.