Batteries have consistently lagged far behind other key components of computational systems to the extent that many large electronics firms and also academic institutions almost gave up on research in the field during the early noughties. While progress in storage and CPUs was explosive, keeping up with or even exceeding the curve defined by Moore’s Law, battery improvement has been iterative with increases in performance being soaked up by ever greater demands on power, by consumer electronic devices such as smartphones and tablets. Instead attention turned to efficient power saving, for example turning off system components when not in use, but since that did not on its own do enough, there has been renewed interest in battery technology over the…