Energy 101, we've been talking about the natural resources that we have to drive our energy system

and we've been, been talking essentially about fossil fuels, coal, natural gas, oil and, so let's, let's look at some renewables like solar. Today we're going to want to look at solar energy resources. it's a new ball game when you start talking about solar and wind and, as renewable resources because with coal and oil and gas and that kind of fossil fuel is very convenient, you can just fire up your, your plant, whatever you're fueling with those. Fuels. And crank ''em up and run ''em wide open. You control the throttle, so to speak. You can run ''em wide open, you can let ''em idle. You can, just like your car. And you have total control. That's what we call dispatchable in the electric utility industry. But in, whether it's your, your home furnace, you can turn, Turn it up and down and keep your home just the right temperature, but when you have solar and wind, the sun doesn't shine so brightly all the time, and the wind doesn't blow strongly all the time. So it's, we have to make sure that our, the way we use these renewable energy systems can accommodate that up and down resource. And that it comes and goes. In the case of solar, of course, it The sun only shines on the average of about twelve dollars a day. And doesn't shine any at night. So that's the problem right there. and then you have clouds. But the, how much solar energy is there available? We're looking at it as a resource here. That the striking the Earth. That we can figure out, so we can figure out how much there is. And then we can determine. How to use that energy to strike in the earth. But, there's about 300, at noon on a clear day, so if you've got no clouds, it's a nice bright shiny day. And at noon, and the reason it has to be at noon is because that's When the distance that the sun has to travel through the earth's atmosphere is the shortest, you can imagine when it's over at an angle, in ea, early morning or late, it's shining at an angle on you through a longer distance of atmosphere gases. And, that attenuates the sun somewhat so it's always brightest at noon, assuming there no clouds, because that's when the Path link through the, the, the atmosphere is the shortest. So, we, at noon and on a clear day with no clouds and low, low water moisture, if you look directly at

the sun and point a surface. Direct one square foot pointed directly at the surface, so that it's perpendicular to the surface, to the sun rays. You'll get about 300 BTUs per hour falling on that one square foot. Or in metric units, is one kilowatt per square meter. And they're about ten square feet in a square meter. So there's about a tenth of a kilowatt per square foot. If you want in kilowatt units or 300 BTU's per hour. Falling on one square foot. So that's, that's the best you can do at, at noon on a clear day. But now it's decreased by clouds and the angle from early morning to late afternoon. So life gets complicated whereas when we're trying to calculate even how much solar energy is available as a resource. But the good thing is it's free. We don't have to pay anybody for it. Like we do, fossil fuels in particular. Affordable tax is, really come on the forefront with, dropping costs in the last couple of years. And this is just showing one installation on a house roof fairly that's fairly typical on a house. When I say typical, it's a typical good one. The house is obviously, and, looks like design four. The collectors, the house was oriented so it's facing south. And, and the angle of the roof was such that it collects the most energy sunlight, over a year. so, the, thee, this, the best angle. The tilt, because the sun, and, depending on the time of year, is either high in the sky, or low in the southerly direction, if you're in the Northern Hemisphere. But the, ee, for the best annual solar resource falling on your collectors, you want to face the collectors due south, and you want to tilt them up from the horizontal Of, a, the, the, number degrees equal to your latitude. In At lanta, where I am, the, our latitude is 35 degrees, so to get the most solar energy falling on a flat fixed surface, we tilt the, the collectors in the southernly direction. 35 degrees, of course on the equator a horizontal collector will collect the most sunlight over a year, and this is on an annual basis. If you're trying to optimize it for January and you don't care about the summertime, then the angles are different. If you wanted. Optimize in July, then the angles are different. But over the annual average, the latitude and the geometry that shows that, the geom, the best geometry is to have it tilted from the horizontal in the southerly

direction. And, of course, the other limitation. You can't have any trees. Here in Atlanta, most of our residential areas were blessed with a lot of trees in one way. But then, you get a lot of shading. And, so, how, where you can use solar energy depends on the site, the location, and the orient, the orientation of the house. another way we utilize solar energy is what we call solar power tower. There's several ways. I'm just pointing out the two big ones that we'll talk about now that's expanding commercially and fairly rapidly. And in this case You've got thousands of mirrors that you see down there. This is made from an airplane looking down on this circle that's probably one-fourth to one-half a mile in diamater. So it's a large, large installation and it produces electricity and of course the photovoltaic cell produces electricity. The sun shines directly on them and the solid state device has wires running to it, it produces electricity from that. in this case, the sun is reflected by these mirrors. That each one of these little dots are mirror's, on the surface of the earth. And they track, they have two access tracking we call them. You can orient them in any direction you want to. So a computer program makes those mir, mirrors track, so the sun light falling on their mirror, Is reflected off of that mirror on to the top of this tower. And on the top of this tower there's a boile r, a steam boiler, just like in a steam power plant fueled by coal there's, a boiler and a hot Fire oil sustained in this case all the sunlight that is reflected onto this boiler heats the boiler up to very high temperatures and boils the steam. So this is one that you've seen built and several of them being built right now as a matter of fact out in California in the Mojave desert and Arizona and those places. The first ones were built back in the 80's. Technology has been around for a while. So for large scale solar, this is a pretty cost effective way to produce electric power. But again, it produces electric power from a conventional steam power plant cycle. But it's using The sun to heat up and boil the steam that's reflected from these thousands of mirrors rather than a fire that's burning fossil fuels. so, how much, how can we calculate how much energy strikes a solar collector surface? Well, as I mentioned, it varies, varies by day of the year because that's

dependent on where the sun is in the sky. And but let's look at the annual average. Energy per day falling on a fixed collector tilted south. Now this includes weather situations cloudy days, rainy days, night of course. And so it's the average and it varies by geographical location. And it also varies by your solar collector orientation and your tracking mat, method. if you have Two Axis Tracking, where it's always looking directly at the sun, well, that's the best. if you have a Fixed Plate Tilted South At the Latitude, which we've just been discussing, that's another option, or you can, sometimes you may only have a Flat Horizontal surface or you want to put them on the side of a building, and it's only a vertical surface. In our, energy building, the carbon neutral energy solutions building that we just built here at Georgia Tech, it has some constant, some photovoltaic collectors on the horizontal awning surface as well as on the vertical surface as well as on the roof tilted south so it's got collectors mounted on one new building with three diffe rent orientations. But, so, how much energy Solar energy falls on a square foot or a square meter on an average day throughout the year is, can be calculated, and it depends on where you are, in the U.S. You can see here, that, over here in Arizona and New Mexico, you get the, the maximum. Solar energy falling. And over in, in Florida and in the northwest, you get less solar energy falling. And, So, that's a, Excuse me. yeah. And. There's a scale here, the maximum we get is about seven kilowatt hours per day on average for the year, seven kilowatt hours per year out here in, Arizona, California, New Mexico. and when you move to the lighter yellow areas Then it goes down to the minimum in the US. Like, up here in the north, you get about four. So, there's almost a factor of two difference in the amount of solar energy falling on these collectors. depending on where you are in the US. And notice, it says at the top. This is, annual in the right, upper right hand corner. So that's the annual average. It's also the. Flat plate, tilted south at the latitude. So it's not tracking, it's fixed. But it's as majority of the collectors and the solar system installations are mounted in exactly this manner, tilted to the south at the latitude they're fixed. Well, how might we calculated. We can actually

calculate this for your, your, or, your location. and by going to a US Department of Energy National Renewable Energy Laboratory called NREL. out in Golden, Colorado, and, it's a laboratory of the US Department of Energy, and they've got an interactive on-line map. So let's go to this, interactive on-line map The web address is as you see on the, on the, in the blue here. http it's a long, long one. Hopefully you can click on it and it will take you there. You can copy and paste it into your browser. So I have my browser up here. At that location, and this is the first page. U.S. Solar Radiation Resource Maps. So you probably want to stop your video and pull this page up at this point, and then come back. And we'll walk through how to use this to calculate, whatever situation and orientation and geographical location you might be. Be interested in. The first thing you can do is you can, select the data type. You can select average, which is noted there right now. You can, select the minimum or you can select the maximum, for the day. The maximum for the day or minimum for the day on, on the average. You can, you can look at the, The, selected by the month. You can pick one month, January through December, or you can pick the annual average. You notice for this chart that I had up and the previous slide. I had selected, as I mentioned to you, the average, annual average, and I picked, and, and, and I wanted to see the annual and not the minimum or maximum for a particular day. and now you can select the orientations, they have a lot of orientations, more than I mentioned to you. you have single axis tracking concentrator. This is just tracking one axis rather than two axis, which of course is cheaper but is more, than two axis. More expensive than a fixed collector. And so, there, there's several Single Axis Tracking options here, and you got two Axis Tracking Flat Plate right here, that always will make the collector look at the sun, but of course, it's got to be mounted on a, on a tracking device. It's got electric motors that's controlled by computers, that always keeps it looking flat, straight at the sun. And, you can do the one that I, that most, most installations are using. A flat plate tilted south at the latitude. And that's the one that I had selected to generate the map that I just showed you before. you can pick the horizontal flat plate down

here. Horizontal flat plate that if you've got a horizontal surface and that's all you got and it's the cheapest way to install them, then you could look and see the penalty for mounting them horizontally versus tilting them southern, south at the latitude angle. Of course, if the equator, the horizontal is also the optimum. you can look at the south facing vertical plate, flat plate, on the south facing wall. north south access tracking they got alot of options here. I won't bother to go through them. But if you look at the horizontal flat plate I'll pick something different. On this one, and the map that I showed you earlier, and you go down here then and you just make those three selections and click view map and now you, you get this map and you get a as you see there. And, you get the kill it down here, you get the kilowatt hours per day. It, it runs from ten to fourteen kWh/m^2/day. The color was none of this on there, all the way down to the darker blue, which is zero to two. And of course, again, the Southwest, which is where you see a lot of installations is the best, and then as you move north in this situation, they, you're getting further away from the equator where the horizontal is optimum and you collect less and less energy or you, less of the, the solar energy strikes the surface So that's a, that's a nice interactive web site so you can look at your situation and look at any kind of tracking option or mounting option that you might be interested in. Thank you.