Site Selection for Wind Farm Installation

Abstract: Wind energy offers significant potential for near-term (2020) and long-term (2050) greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reductions. A number of different wind energy technologies are available across a range of applications, but the primary use of wind energy of relevance to climate change mitigation is to generate electricity from larger, grid- connected wind turbines, deployed either on- or offshore. On land as well as the Off-shore both are the possible choice for the wind farm developers. The off shore wind farms are considered better over the onshore counterpart due to various regions. They have more wind potential as it has stronger and more consistent wind profile. Among different criterions the selection of site is the first step for the wind farm developers. Various techniques are used for site identification of onshore/off shore/land based wind farms. It includes installation of a wind mast for several months / years and recording of relevant data and the other method is use of geographic information system (GIS), for data collection and analysis purpose. The objective of this paper is to apply the developed algorithms for selection of appropriate location for the installation of wind turbines. Matlab software (version R2011b) has been used for the implementation of the algorithm. The results are presented in graphical form and analyzed suitably.

Keywords: Site Selection, Geographic Information System, Wind Turbine.