Wind Resource Data Analysis for Mosoboharena Wind Farm
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Date
2015-10
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Ethiopia has been relied much on hydroelectric plants for of its power demand. But Hydro
power is exposed to the effects of climatic change. Problem of water level fluctuation is
increasing continuously in most of the hydropower dams resulting from the climate
change. As the demand for safe and clean electricity increases due to industrial
development and population growth in the country, expanding wind energy industry is
greatly helpful to Ethiopia to meet its growing massive energy demand and to promote
sustainable development. The country has enormous potential to generate electricity from
wind.
This study investigates the wind energy resource potential for Mosobo-Harena using
different statistical methods and software. MS-Excel and MATLAB programs were used
to generate time-series graphs of wind speed and direction , frequency distributions of
wind speeds (wind speed histogram) and a wind rose for 12 continuous months from
January 1/2007 to December 31/ 2007. And WAsP (The Wind Atlas Analysis and
Application Program) was used for predicting wind resources, wind atlas generation,
develop site wind resource map, identify wind potential sites, sitting of wind turbines and
estimating farm annual energy production (AEP). The analysis was conducted based on
one year 10 minutes interval wind speed collected data from mast at Mosobo-Harena at
heights of 10m and 40m above ground level. This site has an average wind speed of 5.47
m/s and annual wind power density is 161w/m2 at mast height of 10m.
The digital map of the study area was prepared by digital map generating software called
Global Mapper considering an area of 20km by 20 km. Grid resource map for the wind
farm was generated at some standard heights of 10m, 40m, 60m, 80m and 100m. Then
from these standard heights, the hub height of the turbine was decided to be 60m for this
project. And thus wind turbine Vestas V60-850kw was selected from WAsP
documentation catalogue.
The proposed wind farm has 72 turbines. At the selected turbine hub height of 60m, the
annual mean wind speed and wind power density of the farm are 6.79m/s and 316W/m2
respectively, this is categorized as IEC class-III wind resource at this height. And the
farm installed capacity is 61.8 MW, the net farm AEP is estimated to be 201686.7 MWhr
and the average capacity factor was calculated to be 37.6%.
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Keywords
Hydroelectric plants