Surpluses of energy and electrical vehicles enchufables

Last week a reader was asking me on the possibility of being useful excentes of energy in the night for that it recharges with the electrical cars enchufables. The question arose from one words of the Minister of Industry, Mr. Sebastián.

I have wanted to answer to this consultation with an article (thank you Jaime). The minister said the following thing, more or less:

“an energy that is already there, and that now we do not use, that is the electricity that takes place in the night”

In other occasions I have spoken about the energy surpluses. In fact it is very strange that electric power takes place in excess, since REE has a few consumption forecasts and the production is adapted to these forecasts, modulating the production with each of the available sources as the necesidade and the production capacity of the above mentioned sources.

For example, the nuclear energy as source will be always used and his electric power production is constant, since the reactors cannot stop. The sources more modulables as for production are the wind power (whenever there is wind) and the hydraulics (with the wealth changes for periods).

Thus in the night it is possible to allow producing hydraulic power and it is possible that the production capacity of the wind one is major than it is used (it is not possible to allow producing completely with other energy sources if we attend on the whole national territory). To these renewable energy sources they are to those that we can refer like “surpluses“ although in fact it does not take place any more than it is needed.

This aptitude to produce more energy by means of renewable sources does not mean that it has no cost, but I will obviate this topic in this article.

The question is that we can increase a little the night electrical demand to recharge the electrical cars, and on having used renewable energy, we would be quite clean.

The question that always arises when we think that we have major energy production capacity in hours vale by means of renewable energy sources, it is if we might store this energy to use it in the rush hours.

The answer to this question is simple: it is already done what one can. In the hydroelectric power stations that allow it (reversible calls), when in hours vale can produce to itself energy that is not needed, it is used to pump water towards the top reservoir later to use to produce energy again in schedules top.

Apart from this the storability of energy is limited. Nevertheless we can quote other ways of doing it as I have commented in previous articles:

• underground in compressed air: energy wears out in compressing the air but it is an energy that takes place in abundance and when his use is needed it is used generated by the compressed air
• giant batteries (they can give service from 15 minutes until several hours)
• hydrogen: apart from the accident control measures for his storage later we will have the problem of his catalización. Supposing that we could store in hydrogen all the energy that we wanted, might we use it later without problems?

In answer to Jaime, the hydrogen theoretically is a good alternative of storage of energy. At present it is used thinking about the vehicles moved by batteries of fuel, and like energy reservoir about some isolated facilities where they depend on the proper energy production to be supported.

Anyway the hydrogen at the moment has the disadvantage of which the fuel batteries are expensive and use a few very scarce metals as catalysts, and therefore it has to improve the technology so that it is an alternative of extensible use.