Wind Energy Output Calculator

As we transition to more sustainable sources of energy, it is useful to predict the power output of weather dependent power sources, like wind turbines, anywhere on the world.

Comment

we needed to republish our program as we misspelled our tag, so it was updated after 4 pm. the code was not changed.

Inspiration

As two of our group members are doing an undergrad in engineering, we were inspired to do a project on sustainability in an engineering sector, and we decided to create an app that would help solve the problem of carbon neutral energy production with wind energy. This is an especially prevalent issue in Alberta as we are almost entirely dependent on coal plants, as well as the oil and gas sector, and phasing them out is becoming more and more important.

What it does

Calculates the power output of a wind turbine in a specific location, dependent on weather forecast data and the specifications of the wind turbine.

How we built it

Our program uses both real time and forecasted weather for any location on the earth, imported from the open source API meteo, as well as accepting both latitudinal and longitudinal values for a location, or a region, city or country, which are converted to a set of coordinates with the help of another database. The program utilizes the hourly temperature, windspeed, and surface pressure at a given location, as well as the user inputted efficiency of the wind turbine and its blade length to calculate the power output of the turbine every hour, and then sums them over the 24 hours of the day being analyzed. It then outputs the forecasted energy output of one turbine over 7 days as a table and as a bar graph to abstract the data for the user and increase user friendliness

Challenges we ran into

Importing the data and finding a good open source API provided us a bit of a challenge, as well as determining and applying the mathematical formulas necessary to calculate a wind turbines energy output, as these are dependent on multiple variables. As determining the density of moist air would have required a large amount of additional computation, we decided for the sake of time and efficiency to base our calculations on the pressure of dry air found by the weather API as an approximation for the density of air, which means that our output will not be completely accurate, but will provide a good estimate. We also initially planned to determine the energy production of solar panels by using daylight time data, but we were unable to do so as we had an issue exporting the data from the API. We will likely work on implementing this feature on a later version of the calculator.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Making the calculator able to take in a city or country name and being able to convert these into a latitudinal or longitudinal location, which massively improves the usability of the program, and would allow for its use at a smaller scale, for example in the use of micro mills to power single homes, which would allow a user to determine either how much power they would have to store, buy externally, or cut back on to comfortably and efficiently make it through a week.

What we learned

We learned a lot about both power infrastructure and how to use API databases in programming, as well as website building in general.

What's next for Wind Energy Output Calculator

We are hoping to build on our energy calculator by both making the calculation of the energy output from the wind turbine more accurate by factoring in the vapor pressure of water in moist air, as well as also implementing an additional calculator to calculate the power output of other alernative energy sources, for example Solar panels or tidal generators.

Share this project:

Updates