Generally, battery-fed capacitive loads are charged to high voltages in series of switching cycles with smaller fragments of energy delivered to the load in every cycle to ensure an efficient charging process. In high voltage low power (HVLP) flyback charging circuit, significant portion of input energy drawn from the source in a cycle is utilized by the effective parasitic capacitance of the HV transformer and semiconductor devices and circulated back to the source at the end of the cycle. This reduces the energy delivered to the load per cycle and hence the net energy delivered in the charging process. In this paper, an energy-based analysis and simplified energy-based model for HVLP charging circuits is derived. An energy-based approach is appropriate to describe and define the HVLP converter behavior in terms of load energy component and circulating energy component. The derived energy-based model is extended to obtain analytical closed-form expressions governing the essential parameters of the charging circuit. The proposed energy-based model and analytical formulation of essential parameters are experimentally validated on a 0-2.5 kV programmable high voltage charging circuit prototype fed from 12 V input battery source. © 1986-2012 IEEE.