Wind energy assessment: Masdar City case study

Annual wind data at Masdar City (24.4202° N, 54.6132° E) has been recorded in attempt to assess wind energy potential. Thereby, accurate wind energy production can be assessed for a given region. The vertical wind profile is inferred and was appropriately fitted with power law profile. The spectrum of the temporal data is obtained which exhibits turbulent type. Investigation of high resolution temporal records also emphasized the turbulence, non-periodicity, and intermittency of the wind data. Consequently, frequency-scale wavelet decomposition is carried out, and intermittency of the data is identified. The measured wind capacity categorized Masdar City as poor wind region. It is followed by fitting the measured wind data with the maximum likelihood Weibull distribution. The power curves of two sizes of horizontal axis wind turbines (HAWTs) are coupled with the Weibull distribution. The annual energy production was found to be 3307.08 MWh and 28.73 MWh at the height of 50 m for the large and small turbine, respectively. Considering the turbine efficiency and the return on the investment for the current case study, results are in favor of small size HAWT deployment, i.e. 3.5 KW Windspot, over the larger size.