CEE 265 Lecture Notes - Mass Flow Rate, Volumetric Flow Rate, Wind Speed

• School: U of M
• Department: Civil And Environmental Engineering
• Course: CEE 265
• Professor: Phillip Savage

Document Summary

Wind, solar, and other forms share some qualities: available throughout most of the world, low energy fluxes, intermittent availability (due to periods of no sun or no wind, high capital cost per unit power output. Relative intensity of energy being received (flux) is a lot lower for renewable: conventional energy forms are higher, wind and solar are fairly expensive compared to fossil generation. Electricity generation figures: effectiveness (eff): the fraction of energy in a resource that can be collected by the system, capacity factor (cf): a long-term average power output relative to the maximum. Relates money spent on system to how much we use on an hourly basis. Ideally we want this to be high: but renewable resources are intermittent so the cf is usually low. It is not a new resource: they were used for milling in ancient societies, used to sail ships for many years now.