Offshore wind speed and wind power characteristics for ten locations in Aegean and Ionian Seas
- PDF / 1,362,160 Bytes
- 13 Pages / 595.276 x 793.701 pts Page_size
- 42 Downloads / 188 Views
partment of Environmental and Natural Resources Management, University of Ioannina, Seferi 2, 30100 Agrinio, Greece. 2 Center for Engineering Research, Research Institute, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Dhahran 31261, Saudi Arabia. 3 Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering Department, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa. ∗ Corresponding author. e-mail: [email protected]
This paper utilizes wind speed data measured at 3 and 10 m above water surface level using buoys at 10 stations in Ionian and Aegean Seas to understand the behaviour of wind and thereafter energy yield at these stations using 5 MW rated power offshore wind turbine. With wind power densities of 971 and 693 W/m2 at 50 m above water surface level, Mykonos and Lesvos were found to be superb and outstanding windy sites with wind class of 7 and 6, respectively. Other locations like Athos, Santorini and Skyros with wind power density of more than 530 W/m2 and wind class of 5 were found to be the excellent sites. Around 15–16% higher winds were observed at 10 m compared to that at 3 m. Lower values of wind speed were found during summer months and higher during winter time in most of the cases reported in the present work. Slightly decreasing (∼2% per year) linear trends were observed in annual mean wind speed at Lesvos and Santorini. These trends need to be verified with more data from buoys or from nearby onshore meteorological stations. At Athos and Mykonos, increasing linear trends were estimated. At all the stations the chosen wind turbine could produce energy for more than 70% of the time. The wind speed distribution was found to be well represented by Weibull parameters obtained using Maximum likelihood method compared to WAsP and Method of Moments.
1. Introduction The power of the wind in good onshore locations has already been transformed to an opportunity for economic profit and is becoming competitive with other power generation methods. The main advantage of offshore wind power is that wind speeds are generally higher than over land (Bailey et al. 2002). The other factor, which encourages offshore wind farm development, is the reduced wind turbulence. Thus, the offshore turbines are likely to
have less fatigue stresses. Musial and Butterfield (2004) reported the cost of offshore wind energy to be $US0.051/kWh based on a generic 5 MW rated capacity wind machine for a hypothetical wind farm of 500 MW installed capacity. The global cumulative offshore wind power installed capacity reached 2940 MW with an addition of 883 MW in 2010 alone, a value almost 52% more than that installed in 2009. According to EWEA 2010 statistics, annual additions in offshore global wind power installed capacity present an increasing trend for
Keywords. Offshore wind power assessment; Ionian Sea; Aegean Sea; buoys; wind speed; Weibull distribution; frequency distribution. J. Earth Syst. Sci. 121, No. 4, August 2012, pp. 975–987 c Indian Academy of Sciences
975
976
Haralambos S Bagiorgas et al.
almost each year from 2001 to 2010, making the cumul
Data Loading...
