Imagine being able to charge your spent laptop or phone battery in 30 seconds, and your electric car in a few minutes.
Okay, I'm imagining it.. hang on a second here.. okay.
2025 TESLA GRAPHMOBILE pulls up to a 100 kW Supercharger. Driver hops out, pops in the slender supercharger connector, taps his watch. 3 minutes later, the green 100% light flashes and the driver hops back in and tears off into the distance.
10 miles later, the driver coasts to a stop at the next Supercharger. Driver hops out again, recharges.
Now.. if you had a 1MW link? 100 miles in 3 minutes? That'd be amazing. At 480V you'd need 2000A.
0000 or 4/0 cable is rated at 260A with 90C insulation.
Here's a single 4/0 cable with insulated sheathing.
You'd need 8 of these to transfer 2000A.
..
Also, unlike batteries, Graphene supercapacitors are non-toxic.
Tesla may beg to differ.
http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/mythbusters-part-3-recycling-our-non-toxic-battery-packsZero was very proud of the non-toxic nature of the molicel cells they used prior to 2012. I haven't seen them talk about that recently.
Q: Aren't the batteries used in electric vehicles highly toxic?
A: Zero is the only company with a non-toxic battery. It's landfill-safe; you could eat it if you wanted to! It is possible to make these high-output batteries and still have them be completely benign, but we had to design our own to get one.
Read more: http://www.motorcyclistonline.com/newsandupdates/122_0910_zero_motorcycles_founder/#ixzz2LaACyjV6
Don't get me wrong. Supercapacitors are amazing, and graphene is an amazing material. But without having read the Science paper, "battery-like density" doesn't really tell me a whole lot. I hope they keep pushing it, and I hope we see the technology move from the lab to the store soon. Then we'll have some energy and power density numbers to speculate with.