When there is more than one charge creating an electric field, the potential energy of a particle, or the potential at a point, is obtained by adding up all those created individually by each charge.

The potential has an interesting property: the work carried out by the field, when a charged particle q moves from one point to another, only depends on the potential at these two points and not the path taken. In the attached figure the work carried out to move q from 1 to 2 is the same whether it takes path A or path B. Find out all about it in