I think we all have wondered why our cell phone or laptop battery gets worse at holding a charge over time. It is so frustrating to have to keep your laptop on the charger for it to even work (my last laptop).  I guess I could have bought a new battery... but I didn’t… I suffered like most other people.

We know that rechargeable and disposable batteries use a chemical reaction to produce their energy.  So after  many charges and discharges, the battery loses it's ability to store energy.  Capacitors store energy as an electric field of charged particles created by two metal electrodes.  Although capacitors charge instantly and last longer,  batteries can store larger amounts of energy at a given time.  I have a feeling that this is  changing very fast.

EEStor claims to have combined the best of both battery and ultracapacitor in their Electrical Energy Storage Unit (EESU).  They use a barium-titanate insulator claimed to increase energy far beyond what is being done today - to 280 watts per kilogram.    

Energy storage has been the Achilles heel of the electric car industry. . But with gas price high, everything is being rethought.  Last year Maxwell gave some ultracapacitor cells and integration kits to the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory for a collaborative research project to make a ultra capacitor/lithium-ion battery energy storage system for HEV and PHEVs. 

So the Question:  Will we see an Ultrabattery or a SupercapBattery?  When?