Research Articles

The global electric vehicle population reached 3 million units at the end of 2017, which represents approximately 0.23% of the global vehicle population. Electric vehicle producers have responded to consumer's range anxiety by increasing the available range per charge in their vehicles to more than 200 miles. However ultimately the deployment of electric vehicles will depend on the deployment of ubiquitous chargers.

2018 is regarded as the beginning year for battery recycling as the first batch of batteries are gradually coming out of electric vehicles. Umicore has recently announced their investment plan in ramping up battery recycling capacity in preparation for the boom of spent EV batteries. By 2018, we will already have around 33,000 retired electric vehicle battery packs (including electric passenger cars and buses) which amounts to around 1GWh storage capacity.

IDTechEx will be hosting a free webinar on Tuesday 9 October titled New Trends in Biosensors for Biomedical Diagnostics.

Lionrock Batteries Ltd. is developing and manufacturing flexible rechargeable battery technologies to address the rapidly growing and evolving needs for energy storage in new wearables, medical devices and other consumer IoT devices.

Recently, research undertaken by the UK's House of Commons library at the request of the UK's Labor Party revealed that diabetic foot and toe amputations performed by the UK's National Health Service has risen by 26%.

The new IDTechEx report, "Airborne Wind Energy 2019-2039" comes just as new generation, zero emission electricity production approaches a tipping point. The new generation addresses the new world of distributed power for minigrids and microgrids and replacement of diesel gensets, so it is mobile with no infrastructure. Installation in one hundredth of the time and making electricity where it is needed without power lines across the horizon: what is there not to like?

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of China has recently announced the pilot program of recycling and second use of retired electric vehicle batteries in 17 major regions and cities. China Tower, the world's biggest operator of telecommunication towers, is included as the only company in the pilot program to develop key technologies, explore business models and help establish standards related to second-life batteries.

Intelligent Health AI is a global summit dedicated to AI in healthcare. The analysts Dr Xiaoxi He and Dr Luyun Jiang attended the conference on 13-14th September 2018 held in Basel, Switzerland.

It took a decade and half to enable the first commercial products using flexible barrier or thin film encapsulation technologies. Contrary to some assumptions however, this success does not mean that the question of barrier technology is forever settled. Indeed, there is still much work to do to render flexible barrier technology a ubiquitous, widely-available, and low-cost component in devices of all sizes, sensitivity levels, flexibility degrees, and so on.

Hyundai Motor Group has recently announced a commercial partnership with energy company Wärtsilä to utilize second-life electric vehicle batteries for stationary energy storage at both commercial and utility scales. This is not the first piece of news that automotive companies are trying to give a second life to their retired EV batteries as major EV manufactures including Nissan, Renault, BMW, Daimler, BYD etc. have announced various battery second use projects around the world.

Graphene is not a young material: the Nobel Prize was awarded in 2010 and the first pioneering firms were established before that c. 2006. Graphene thus has more than a decade of commercial experience already. As IDTechEx have argued previously, after all this time, graphene is becoming increasingly available and affordable and is finally findings its first wave of volume markets. In this article, we will look at the evolution of graphene commercialization so far and will offer some insights about the future.

The end-of-life issue of electric vehicle batteries is a key topic in the sustainability of EVs. By 2029, there will be 3 million used battery packs coming out of EVs per year which amounts to around 108GWh available storage capacity (see the IDTechEx's latest report on Second-life Electric Vehicle Batteries). What will happen to this huge amount of retired car batteries?