Batteries have come a long way since Italian professor Alessandro Volta invented the first iteration some 200 years ago.
Even so, there are few candidate battery types that are suitable for storing energy on large scales - within an electrical power grid, for example.
Given that electricity is generally not stored, the grid has to carefully balance consumer demand for electricity with the amount being supplied by generators.
Grid-scale energy storage - sequestering electricity and then releasing it on demand - would be highly desirable. But any technology designed for such a purpose would have to deal with daunting amounts of power, be very cheap and have a long service lifetime.
Prof Donald Sadoway, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, US, has been working on one technology designed to fulfil these requirements - liquid metal batteries.
The effort is now approaching a critical juncture. Sadoway has been working to scale up the technology through his company Ambri and is aiming for a commercial prototype to be ready by 2014.
At least 18 months from now, we'll have something we can put in the hands of an independent assessor, Prof Sadoway told BBC News.
We want to make sure we've got something that's durable and will perform to specification. This is a very tough market to get into.
We can't afford to have a failure because something wasn't quite right. That could tarnish the image of the technology to the point where it would be set back irreparably.
