Net Energy

Net energy refers to the total amount of energy generated over a period of time. In Windographer this is generally in the context of simulating the amount of energy produced by a wind turbine in a certain wind regime.

When Windographer preforms net energy calculations, it does so by doing a timestep-by-timestep calculation of energy, and then summing the amount of energy in each timestep to obtain the total. This is in contrast to first obtaining an average power value and then multiplying this by the total length of the time period. The difference lies in how gaps or flagged data are considered. Average power values may be calculated by ignoring gaps and data that is flagged to be excluded in calculations, meaning that multiplying power by the time interval effectively assumes average power production during each time step. In contrast, a timestep-by-timestep net energy calculation (as performed in the Wind Turbine Output window) assumes that gaps or timesteps flagged with excluded flags produce zero energy.