Review Article

Climate change and the decreasing availability of fossil fuels require society to move towards sustainable and renewable resources. As a result, we are observing an increase in renewable energy production from sun and wind, as well as the development of electric vehicles or hybrid electric vehicles with low CO2 emissions. Because the sun does not shine during the night, wind does not blow on demand and we all expect to drive our car with at least a few hours of autonomy, energy storage systems are starting to play a larger part in our lives. At the forefront of these are electrical energy storage systems, such as batteries and electrochemical capacitors (ECs)1. However, we need to improve their performance substantially to meet the higher requirements of future systems, ranging from portable electronics to hybrid electric vehicles and large industrial equipment, by developing new materials and advancing our understanding of the electrochemical interfaces at the nanoscale. Figure 1 shows the plot of power against energy density, also called a Ragone plot2, for the most important energy storage systems. Lithium-ion batteries were introduced in 1990 by Sony, following pioneering work by Whittingham, Scrosati and Armand (see ref. 3 for a review). These batteries, although costly, are the best in terms of performance, with energy densities that can reach 180 watt hours per kilogram. Although great efforts have gone into developing high-performance Li-ion and other advanced secondary batteries that use nanomaterials or organic redox couples4–6, ECs have attracted less attention until very recently. Because Li-ion batteries suffer from a somewhat slow power delivery or uptake, faster and higher-power energy storage systems are needed in a number of applications, and this role has been given to the ECs7. Also known as supercapacitors or ultracapacitors, ECs are power devices that can be fully charged or discharged in seconds; as a consequence, their energy density (about 5 Wh kg–1) is lower than in batteries, but a much higher power delivery or uptake (10 kW kg–1) can be achieved for shorter times (a few seconds)1. They have had an important role in complementing or replacing batteries in the energy storage field, such as for uninterruptible power supplies (back-up supplies used to protect against power disruption) and load-levelling. A more recent example is the use of electrochemical double layer capacitors (EDLCs) in emergency doors (16 per plane) on an Airbus A380, thus proving that in terms of performance, safety and reliability ECs are definitely ready for large-scale implementation. A recent report by the US Department of Energy8 assigns equal importance to supercapacitors and batteries for future energy storage systems, and articles on supercapacitors appearing in business and popular magazines show increasing interest by the general public in this topic. Several types of ECs can be distinguished, depending on the charge storage mechanism as well as the active materials used. EDLCs, the most common devices at present, use carbon-based active materials with high surface area (Fig. 2). A second group of ECs, known as pseudo-capacitors or redox supercapacitors, uses fast and reversible surface or near-surface reactions for charge storage. Transition metal oxides as well as electrically conducting polymers are examples of Materials for electrochemical capacitors