Power Needs and Production

The most important building to power is the Governor’s Compound. There are an additional 10 buildings that may also be wired, but they will be lower priority (in some ranked order) that will get power if the system is producing enough. I’m not positive if this will need to be designed into the control system or if it will be a manual switch within the control house.

I’ve done a survey of the buildings that need power and come up with some power estimates for each building. My methodology was to survey the buildings and count light fixtures. Each light fixture consisted of one or two 40 watt fluorescent bulbs; there will certainly be places where different fluorescent or incandescent bulbs are installed but I used this as a planning factor. The PRT also gave me a planning factor of one computer per three rooms. Since I was counting light fixtures and not rooms, I changed this to one computer (assumed to pull 100 watts) per five bulbs. I’ve also assumed that everything was turned on for 8 hours per day, seven days a week. I hope this estimate is a little high but losses in the poorly wired buildings will likely balance this.

Understand that these are very rough calculations, but it is the best I could do. Here is what I came up with:

System Peak load: 44.1 kW
System Daily load: 352.8 kWh

I've rounded these to 45 kW and 350 kWh/day for ease of use. The Governors Compound makes up about 9 or the 45 kWs and 72 of the 350 kWh/day.

Below I’ve pasted some power calculations based on E15 machines, both 35 kW and 65 kW at different wind speeds. Red numbers meet or exceed the projected power needs of the system (350 kWh/day). With three turbines (105 kW or 195kW) you can see that with 20% losses the system produces enough power at only 5 m/s average wind speed. With 50% losses the system produces enough power at 7 m/s average wind speed with the DC system and 6 m/s with the AC system. I know these losses seem exceptionally high, but the quality of materials and installation is poor here, so losses are quite high.

Ideally, this system will produce significantly more power than is needed and the grid can be expanded to include homes and businesses. However, the main goal of the system is provide power to the local government and we need to ensure that goal is met.