Modeling and investigation of the wind resource in the gulf of Tunis, Tunisia

Abstract

Paper presented at the 9th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, Malta, 16-18 July, 2012.

The development of wind energy conversion systems becomes one of the most important aims of any developing countries such as Tunisia. This is due to the reduction in wind turbine costs, and in fossil fuel atmospheric pollution. The evaluation of wind power potential is very necessary to estimate wind resource and therefore conduct the suitable decisions for the wind power generation projects, technical and economical feasibility researches. The presented work in this paper was to investigate the potential of wind resource in the Gulf of Tunis in Tunisia. The hourly mean wind speed and wind direction with a 10-min time step provided by the NRG weather station were used to analyze the wind speed characteristics and the wind power potential. Weibull parameters are estimated based on the most frequently used methods which their accuracy was compared on different goodness of fit tests. Those wind characteristics are required to give wind project users the picture of wind potential in the Gulf of Tunis.