Assessment of wind characteristics for energy generation

Wind technology in Turkey has gained considerable maturity over the last five years, and wind energy projects are becoming commercially attractive in the country. In practice, it is essential to describe the variation of wind speeds for optimizing the design of the systems resulting in less energy generating costs. The wind variation for a typical site is usually described using the so-called Weibull distribution. In this study, the two Weibull parameters of the wind speed distribution function, the shape parameter k (dimensionless) and the scale parameter c (m/s), were computed from the wind speed data for Aksehir in Konya, located in Central Anatolia in Turkey (latitude: 38.35degrees and longitude: 31.42degrees). Wind data, consisting of hourly wind speed records over a 6 year period, 1997-2002, were obtained from the Aksehir State Meteorological Station. Based on the experimental data, it was found that the numerical values of both Weibull parameters (k and c) for Aksehir vary over a wide range. The yearly values of k range from 1.756 to 2.076, while those of c are in the range of 2.956 to 3.444. Average seasonal Weibull distributions for Aksehir are given. The wind speed distributions are represented by Weibull distribution and also by Rayleigh distribution with a special case of the Weibull distribution for k = 2. The Rayleigh distribution is found to be suitable to represent the actual probability of wind speed data for the site studied.