The New York Times writes this weekend that batteries, “long the poor cousin to computer chips in research-obsessed Silicon Valley, are now the rage.” It’s true that the battery has long been an obstacle for increasingly power-hungry gadgets and is now being looked at much more closely for the emerging markets of wearables, as well as electric cars. But Silicon Valley, startups and entrepreneurs haven’t made all that much progress creating battery innovations.

Here’s why:

1). There’s no Moore’s Law for batteries: Battery progress moves much more slowly than the progress of computing, which follows the relatively rapid Moore’s Law. As Bill Gates has said, that quick rate of innovation has in effect spoiled us into mistakenly thinking other sectors beyond digital can move at the same rate as Moore’s Law.

It’s really difficult to deliver battery innovation from the lab to the commercial market on a…