User blog comment:ZerefMidnight/Gray Theory/@comment-7418318-20150407134901/@comment-7418318-20150408065620

Well... it's just speculation on my part since it was never mentioned.

But they did say that the Eclipse II would have roughly equal destructive power as Etherion and the stored up energy of the Etherion-blast in the Tower of Heaven arc would have exploded into a country-buster. That got me thinking.

Obviously the energy was stable enough to store savely, but once they started tempering with the Gate it might have been a different story.

Since it took around 7 years to slowly charge, I would expect a slow discharge to take a roughly equal amount of time.