If advanced batteries or ultracapacitors aren’t the ultimate answer
If advanced batteries or ultracapacitors aren't the ultimate answer, maybe using excess electricity to make hydrogen that can be stored will do the trick. Hydrogen can be produced through simple electrolysis, but technical and cost hurdles have made electrolysis impractical. Today, industrial-scale hydrogen is produced using natural gas as a not-so-clean feedstock.
Not so long ago, a dead battery was an excuse to get a new cell phone or laptop, but these days a lot of people just replace the HP COMPAQ nw8440 Battery.
Even our intensive test ran for nearly three and a quarter hours before the battery was exhausted. This kind of battery life is ordinarily the preserve of ultraportables, and is extremely impressive on a mid-range laptop.
With an energy density approaching that of a fuel cell, but with the less volatile characteristics of a HP Compaq NC6120 Battery, founder and chief technical officer Steven Visco has described lithium-metal as "the holy-grail battery material." Indeed, the theoretic energy density stands at more than 5,000 watt-hours per kilogram, which is 10 times that of current lithium-ion batteries.
David Pogue over at the New York Times wrote a piece last week lamenting the uselessness of the laptop batteries runtime, as quoted by laptop makers. If you've ever used a laptop before, you know exactly what he means--you just can't seem to hit the runtime that they tell you is possible. Obviously, nobody is outright lying here, since the laptop advertisements always uses words such as "up to" to indicate the runtime.
those little tiny computers with a dozen hours of HP Pavilion DV7 Battery life — are growing hugely in popularity lately. Kensington recently came out with an equally tiny wireless mouse, a reversible sleeve, a security lock, a multi-device power adapter and a good, old-fashioned, wired USB mouse.