The ‘silicon supercapacitor,’ was developed when Cary Pint and his team at Vanderbilt University coated a piece of porous silicon with carbon and then heated it in a furnace to about 1500° F in an attempt to build a capacitor from porous silicon. To the team’s surprise, the heating process caused the carbon to form a layer of graphene only a nanometer thick, dramatically increasing the amount of energy the capacitor could store.

The team is currently using the heated-carbon approach to develop energy storage systems that could be built upon the extra material or unused areas of solar cells and sensors. The supercapacitors could store energy during the day for gradual release during peak hours.