How Batteries Work We use batteries everyday, we use them to start our cars and to listen to our Walkmans. I have a few questions: How do batteries work? What are the different kinds of batteries? Why do they die? Why do they lose energy when they are not used for a long time? Well I tried my best to find the best answers for these questions and a little more. Battery, also called an electric cell, is a device that converts chemical energy into electricity. All batteries contain an electrolyte, a positive electrode, and a negative electrode. There are two general types of batteries. Batteries in which chemicals cannot be reconstituted into their