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. Collected records are analyzed for the development of wind predicting models, which can be used in conjunction with different wind turbine power curves. Thereby, accurate wind energy production can be assessed for a given region. The vertical wind profile is inferred and was appropriately fitted with a power-law of 0.13 order. The velocity 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 if the data is identified. The measured wind capacity is categorized as poor wind region and is then modeled following the Weibull fitting. 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 330.62 MWh and 50 MWh at height of 50m 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. 3.5KW Windspot, over the larger size, such as Nordtank 500/41.