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What is electrical potential?
Potential energy can be defined as the capacity for doing work which arises from position or configuration. In the electrical case, a charge will exert a force on any other charge and potential energy arises from any collection of charges. For example, if a positive charge Q is fixed at some point in space, any other positive charge which is brought close to it will experience a repulsive force and will therefore have potential energy. The potential energy of a test charge q in the vicinity of this source charge will be:

                                 
where k is Coulomb's constant.
In electricity, it is usually more convenient to use the electric potential energy per unit charge, just called electric potential or voltage.


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