Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analysis of supercapacitors: A review

The development of clean and sustainable energy sources has received widespread interest in the past few decades due to the rolling energy demands while extenuating the rising tiers of greenhouse gases and environmental pollution. Due to their intermittent nature, these green and sustainable sources require appropriate energy storage systems. Amongst different energy storage technologies, electro-chemical energy storage devices, particularly supercapacitors (SCs), have fascinated global attention for their utilization in electric vehicles, power supports, portable electronics, and many others application requiring electric energy devices for their operation. Thus, the growth of SCs in the commercial market has squeezed requirements, and further developments are obligatory for their effective industrialization. In the meantime, SCs also face technical complications and contests for their introduction in industrial settings because of their low energy density and high Levelized cost. The present study combines core strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analysis of SCs with new perspectives and recent ideas. The challenges and the future progressive prospects of SCs are also presented in detail. This review will afford consistent direction and new superhighways for the further development of SCs as standalone and complementary energy storage systems.(c) 2023 Science Press and Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Published by ELSEVIER B.V. and Science Press. All rights reserved.