A computer program to size agricultural standby power units and electrical service entrances
Compower is a computer program simplifying the sizing of electrical service entrances, generators (standby power units) and fuel reservoirs for agricultural enterprises. Its agricultural database has integrated functions relating power requirement to system capacity and was collected by consulting 47 agricultural enterprises and 24 international suppliers. COMPOWER runs using 5 Mb of memory space, under Windows 95 or 98 and offers user friendly screens organized to simplify and reduce the number of entries. The database contains a list of electrical units used by specific enterprises (livestock, cash cropping, fruit and vegetables or horticultural) and has the operator enter, for each electrical unit, its daily time of operation, and its capacity and its voltage. The capacity is determined either directly or by a simplified function, such as building type and floor area for lighting. From the entries, COMPOWER computes a graph of the hourly power peaks over 24 h with the possibility of re-scheduling operations to reduce large demand peaks. Finally, COMPOWER recommends sizes for the electrical service entrance, the generator and the 3 day capacity fuel tank. COMPOWER was successfully tested by 12 agricultural producers and on five different agricultural enterprises.
standby power units electrical service entrance generators fuel storage