Ahmad Zahedi, Associate Professor
College of Science, Technology, and Engineering
James Cook University
Townsville
Queensland, Australia
Presented by Ahmad Zahedi, Associate Professor.
College of Science,Technology and Engineering,
James Cook University, Queensland, Australia.
Wind energy definitely will hold the essential input for economic development and industrialization. Wind power helps reducing climate change, and unlike conventional power generators, wind power use unlimited natural resources, does not produce pollution, and the most important factor is that wind power is a mature technology.
A well-designed and optimum wind energy conversion system (WECS) will be a cost effective and reliable system. Obviously, knowledge of all the factors which have influence on the performance of a WECS is necessary for accurate estimation of power delivered by the system.
There are many factors that have influence on the power generated by a wind turbine. One of these factors is the wind speed distribution of the selected site, where the wind turbine is installed. This is the most important factor, as theoretical power generated by wind turbine is proportional to wind speed to the power of three. As wind speed changes continuously, then power generated by wind turbine changes significantly. The other factors include the height of wind turbine and the power curve of a chosen wind turbine. Power curves, which are made available by wind turbine manufacturers, play an important role in condition monitoring, and help to estimate the wind energy potential of a chosen wind turbine. Because of the variation nature of wind speed, every wind turbine demonstrates a unique performance and delivers a unique power.
The aim of this tutorial session is to present a comprehensive review of operational analysis of wind power. For the purpose of full operation analysis and performance comparison, a series of commercially available wind turbines of similar sizes (in terms of their rated power in MW) have been selected. Full analysis of these wind turbines is performed and output power, capacity factors, utilization factors, and electricity costs are compared.