
"Okay, so I was watching Back to the Future the other day and when they start talking about the 1.21 Giga-watts of power needed, Doc Brown says it can't be done. So I started pondering how I might generate that kind of power and an idea hit me. Since they were only talking about needing that type of power for a very short time, they weren't talking about Giga-Watt-Hours, but rather Giga-Watts. Hence, why the bolt of lightening was able to work. Well, that being the case, I decided it should be possible to charge up a ton of high-voltage capacitors and put them in series and generate 1.21 Gigawatts that way. Obviously the movie plot would have been less interesting, though.
But that got me to thinking about something. I know capacitors can't currently power electric cars because they simply can't store enough amp-hours to be of any practical use. But I began to wonder if you could offset that by raising the voltage. For example, would it be possible to store a trillion volts in a capacitor? Even if the amp-hours were very tiny, the total watt-hours would be pretty high, right? Then you could attempt to down-convert that when drawing out power to drive the car. Now, I'm sure there is some reason why this won't work otherwise I'm sure people would already be doing it. So I'm not expecting everyone to start cheering as I just solved all of the problems with energy storage. I'm just curious if anyone can explain why it won't work."
Em: http://www.mynissanleaf.com/viewtopic.p ... 78c25f65aa