The talk is they will be able to get 20 kilowatt hours into a suitcase sized battery. That will keep the puters and CF lights going but not the AC.

Consider a smallish well-insulated suburban house with an 18,000 BTU air conditioner (1.5 tons), 16 SEER (you can get more efficient units these days), that runs 8 hrs/day during the worst of the season. That works out to 9.0 kWh/day, so that suitcase-sized battery could run it for a couple of days. If we're talking about lots of short outages, such a battery could carry you over; if we're talking about days-long outages, that's a different matter.

A patent for such a battery that can be sold at a reasonable price (say, less than $3K just as a point to talk around) that can be made reasonably rugged is going to make someone very rich. One such battery gives you roughly a 60-mile all-electric range in a hybrid auto (assuming you don't want to run the battery below about 25% charged); three of them give you a two-day backup for the typical 30 kWh/day suburban household; three days if that household has done the easy things like CFL and reduced their load to 20 kWh/day. In at least some parts of the US, four such batteries, split between the house and cars -- if deployed ubiquitously -- would be enough to allow local solar/wind to power home and personal transportation needs.