Some slight confusion on the part of electricity and the conversion to mechanical force; I believe I understand enough about circuits, current flow, capacitors and the like to know that side of the question, but what I don't see is how electricity is converted to large scale (relative to an electron) motion.

 

For example, if I wanted to make an extremely basic fan, how would I go about doing it so that the electric potential stored inside the batteries powers the movement of the blades?

Your battery would produce a strong and long-lasting current, or flow of electrons, not only a potential quickly vanished as in typical experiments with electrostatic toys.

 

Send this current in an electric motor to rotate the fan. Up to now, all efficient motors use a magnetic field to produce a "Lorenz force" (Wiki) in a conductor where a current flows. This has made electric machines possible historically.

 

My electrostatic alternator-motor is an alternative (or at least I believe it...). This way hadn't been taken for a century, as it looks.

http://saposjoint.net/Forum/viewtopic.php?f=66&t=1684

But I didn't check if it's any usable for a fan. Normal air isn't the very good insulator my machine prefers. On dam alternators we can afford vacuum, on wind turbines a liquid insulator, on boat propeller pods a high-pressure special gas; in a fan I imagine only air.

 

Marc Schaefer, aka Enthalpy