Assessment of renewable energy potential, at Aqaba in Jordan

The present paper is aimed to assess the potential of renewable energy resources, namely wind and solar, at Aqaba city located in the southern region of Jordan. Long-term measured data of wind speed and solar irradiation at the site are utilized in this study. Skew-Normal (SN) distribution is used to describe wind speeds and irradiance levels. The main feature of SN distribution over, the well known, Weibull distribution is the possibility of applying it to a data set having zero values. The goodness-of-fit of SN-model is demonstrated graphically, via Chi-Square (CS) distribution and through Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) statistical test. To show the effect of turbine hub's height, wind speed characteristics and wind power potential are estimated at different heights. The recorded solar irradiation levels are separated into three clusters and SN distribution is used to fit the data of each cluster. Solar insolation characteristics: mean and most occurrence insolations, and irradiance power potential are computed and presented in this paper. The results obtained show that Aqaba has a great potential of utilizing stand-alone, grid-connected or hybrid renewable energy systems. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.