Physics 333 Problem Set #3

Question 1 - Vesta Windmills

To find an ideal placement of a turbine, we need to understand at what wind speeds

turbine would operate most efficiently. You might think you want to run it at full
power, but if you’re not efficient, the excessive wear on the turbine could be costly.

A common word turbine is the Vesta V90 - 3.0 MW (turbine diameter = 90 m). The
actual power produced by the turbine as a function of wind speed is plotted below.

Use data from the graph to find the efficiency of Vesta windmill. You will need to
read them off the graph and reproduce it in some plotting tool, such as Excel.

a) Plot the theoretical power that can be obtained from this wind turbine.

b) Plot the efficiency of the Vesta V90 - 3.0 MW as a function of wind speed.

c) How does the efficiency which you found compare to the Betz efficiency? As
the wind speed increases, why does the efficiency change?
Question 2 – Designing a Vesta Wind Farm

Wayne bought a hilly, cougar-filled piece of land, that happened to have the highest
average winds in Saskatchewan. He now gets paid by the government to house 82
windmills on it, a few of which are shown below. Below the windmills he raises organic
buffalo, which have eyes as deep as the void space, and in his other land he grows
organic alfalfa. Not bad for a romantic.

Assume the wind turbines are the Vesta V90 - 3.0 MW turbine and that the average
wind speed is 12 m/s.

• Estimate how much land area these windmills occupy.

• How much power do the 82 windmills generate?

• How many homes in Saskatoon do they power? When searching the data you
need, keep in mind that this question asks about total (electricity + gas) power
consumption per a household in Saskatoon.
Question 3 - Brandywine Creek Run of River Project

Run-of-the-river projects harness power from the natural flow and elevation drop of
a river. In the Brandywine project, water is diverted from the river into a pipe in
which it flows down the hill, through the turbine, and returns to the river.

The project at Brandywine Creek produces 40,000 MWh of electricity per year (i.e.,
a mean power of 4.6 MW). The diverted water drops 280 m in elevation between
where it leaves the river and where it reaches the turbines. Estimate:

• The flow rate of the water going into the turbine, and
• The radius of the pipe in which the water flows down.
Question 4 - Photovoltaics vs. Corn

A large corn grower and a large photovoltaic manufacturer are both competing for a
energy delivery contract in Vancouver. Being tight on land, the city of Vancouver is
interested in the project using as little area as possible.

Let’s do a Fermi Calculation to estimate the land usage of using corn for energy vs.
using solar cells for energy. You can use various numbers derived in our lessons, but
don’t forget to tell us where you took them from. Ideally, you should use the same
conditions for corn and solar panels (accounting or not accounting for cloudy days,
etc.). If the conditions or geometry that you use for solar panels and corn differ,
explain the difference.

a) Estimate the area of photovoltaic cells required to generate 1 GWe (Gigawatt-

electric) of power.

b) If we were to grow a field of corn and burn it to generate the same amount of
power, how big would our field have to be?

Note that corn only grows once per year, so you’ll have to consider either the
photovolatics working for a year and compare the energies, or the energy per year
generated by corn to get a power.