All world's batteries only would hold 10 minutes of world's energy

quote from page 21 of Fareed Zacharia's article called "The New Oil and Gas Boom" Time magazine October 29, 2012.

(Bill Gates has calculated that if you took all the world's batteries, they together would have enough capacity to store 10 minutes worth of the world's demand for energy.) But they are gradually becoming competitive with fossil fuels" end quote.

This is a really mind boggling fact when you start to think about it in regard to renewables. So, there is a lot of room in developing battery capacity and more efficient batteries for companies worldwide in regard to renewables like, Solar, Wind, Wave and Geothermal. 

next quote same article page 21

"The best bet is for the U.S. is not only to expand oil and gas production but also to increase funding for research and development of new sources of energy. We need more breakthrough technologies and new designs and processes. But the government should also aid these nascent technologies by helping them achieve scale--- which comes only from  large deployment of these technologies. The U.S. government---the dDepartment of Defense and then NASA-- bought almost half of all computer chips  produced by Silicon Valley in the 1950s until the industry could sufficiently lower its costs to be commerciall viable." end quote. 

I think Fareed might be a little confused here. Because he is a younger man he might not know that chips (at least microprocessor chips were not produced anywhere until the 1970s). However, larger circuit boards that were not necessarily silicon based were. But compared to now those boards had less computing capacity than today's pocket calculators that are solar powered on the lights in your home.