Nanoporous carbons in supercapacitors possess high Brunner-Emmett-Teller (BET) surface area and pore volume, normally achieved by activation. Among various activation methods, chemical activation using potassium hydroxide (KOH) is widely used in academic studies, as it allows the controlled and efficient development of microporosity at lower temperatures with higher yields compared to physical activation. The combination of hydrothermal pretreatment of biomass and chemical activation has also proven to be a promising route to synthesising high-performance nanoporous carbons for EDLCs. During the KOH activation process, KOH decomposes into K2CO3 around 400°C, which further breaks down into K2O and CO2 at temperatures above 700°C, leading to activated carbons with high BET surface areas and development of pores around 2 nm diameter. In our recent studies of 20 commercial microporous activated carbons, we showed that the degree of disorder, and specifically the sizes of the graphene-like domains, correlates with their capacitance in organic electrolyte. Carbons with smaller graphene-like domains were found to have larger capacitances. This was revealed through solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy experiments combined with mesoscopic simulations. In the NMR measurements, the sizes of the graphene-like domains were measured via the Δδ values of adsorbed electrolyte ions in electrolyte-soaked carbon samples, where; ∆𝛿𝛿 (𝑝𝑝𝑝𝑝𝑝𝑝) = 𝛿𝛿 𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖-𝑝𝑝𝑝𝑝𝑝𝑝𝑝𝑝 -𝛿𝛿 𝑖𝑖𝑝𝑝𝑛𝑛𝑛𝑛 𝑝𝑝𝑒𝑒𝑝𝑝𝑒𝑒𝑛𝑛𝑝𝑝𝑝𝑝𝑒𝑒𝑒𝑒𝑛𝑛𝑝𝑝 (1) where 𝛿𝛿 𝑖𝑖𝑝𝑝𝑛𝑛𝑛𝑛 𝑝𝑝𝑒𝑒𝑝𝑝𝑒𝑒𝑛𝑛𝑝𝑝𝑝𝑝𝑒𝑒𝑒𝑒𝑛𝑛𝑝𝑝 is the chemical shift of the neat electrolyte and 𝛿𝛿 𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖-𝑝𝑝𝑝𝑝𝑝𝑝𝑝𝑝 is the chemical shift of the "in-pore" resonance, which arises from ions located within the nanopores of the carbon material. the delocalised electrons in the aromatic carbon rings give rise to a local magnetic field which is experienced by the in-pore ions as a nucleus independent chemical shift (NICS). The magnitude of the NICS (and therefore Δδ) depends on the sizes of the graphene-like domains in the porous carbon, the pore size distribution of the carbon, and adsorption effects which influence the average carbon-ion separation. Our previously reported NMR simulation approach provides a simple method to model these effects, accounting for both the pore sizes and ion-carbon interactions, therefore allowing a representative graphenelike domain size to be extracted from the NMR spectrum. The approach assumes a carbon slit-pore model comprised of polyaromatic hydrocarbon pore walls, and uses the experimentally acquired pore size distributions of the carbons from gas sorption, as well as carbon-ion density profiles obtained from molecular dynamics simulations. Beyond NMR spectroscopy, other spectroscopic probes of carbon disorder have been developed, the most widely and routinely used being Raman spectroscopy. Raman spectra of disordered nanoporous carbons exhibit two major features. First, the D band (between 1330 and 1350 cm -1 ) is attributed to the A1g breathing mode of the six membered carbon rings in a graphene sheet, and only appears when there is structural disorder. Second, the G band (between 1580 and 1590 cm -1 ) is assigned to the E2g stretching mode of the sp 2 bonds. In Raman measurements, the graphene-like domain size in nanoporous carbons is characterised by the intensity ratio of the D band to the G band (ID/IG, peak height), with more disordered carbons having smaller ID/IG (peak height) values for stage 2 carbons within the 3-stage model proposed by Robertson and Ferrari. Our recent Raman spectroscopy study of a large family of carbons supported the findings from NMR that carbons with smaller graphene-like domains have higher capacitances in symmetric EDLCs in a conventional organic electrolyte 1 M tetraethylammonium tetrafluoroborate in acetonitrile (1 M NEt4BF4/ACN). Upon thermal annealing of the commercial activated carbons, we observed that the sizes of the graphene-like domains increased with increasing annealing temperature, with the capacitance decreasing.