Hi Amanda,
I've done a bit of micro processor work here (on a plasmacutter), and have found that it is very hard to make a design EM hardened enough to not occasionally crash
in a hostile environment.
I changed one cirquit that I could not get stable over to an analogue design and all the trouble went away, for a code jockey that is a really annoying thing to do.
(this circuit sampled the across-the-arc voltage of a running plasma cutter to do automatic height adjustment in order to minimize dimensional errors while cutting thin sheetmetal at fairly high speeds).
As to high current caps the biggest problem is probably inductance, most big caps are almost as much 'L' as they are 'C' if the frequency gets high enough... check out capacitors made for 'studio flash banks', they have very low inductance and will charge and discharge at phenomenal rates. They may be a bit more expensive than regular electrolytics with the same capacitance but not as much as you may think. Wiring is also a really big factor in a setup like that. I realise the 232 operates at the milliwatt level, that was a joke, but still if you could overcome the scaling problems then it might be possible to build a maximum power point tracker with nearly 100% efficiency using whatever windings a given generator has to perfectly match the impedance all the time. It would be a great thing, and a huge step forward from transformers and such.
Possibly a bunch of IGBT's could be used to do the switching, I'm not too current on those things but the on resistance is something to drool over. No heat dissipation whatsoever at 50A and more (tiny little heatsinks...). It would also save tons of money in transmission lines from tower to battery bank, and you could use it for photo voltaics as well as for windpower. Like a transformer for DC almost, without the problems inductor based dc-dc convertors have. (whine, 2-5 % loss, very bad EM behaviour and so on). At the current prices for cable a setup like that would probably be cost effective at distances > 100 ft or so, which is most of them, and it would be able to transform both 'up' and 'down' changing smoothly from charging in parallell to charging in series as conditions change.