Efficiency assessments for some state of the art wind turbines in the coastal environments of the Black and the Caspian seas

Abstract

The main objective of the present work is to assess the wind energy resources in the Black and in the Caspian seas. Additionally, the electric power expected to be provided by various state of the art technologies was also evaluated. For this reason, several reference points were considered in the coastal environments of the two areas targeted. In order to assess the wind potential in these locations, 12 year of data coming from the US National Centers for Environmental Prediction were processed and analyzed. From the analysis of the wind power density (corresponding to a height of 80 m), it was possible to evaluate the spatial and seasonal distributions of the wind resources, and also to identify some hot spot areas. Since the regions located near the shoreline are under the influence of the diurnal/nocturnal fluctuations, a special attention was paid to this aspect. This is especially due to the fact that the power output of a wind farm project is supposed to be significantly influenced by such variations. In the second part of the work, several offshore wind turbines were considered and their performances were evaluated in relationship with the local wind patterns. Based on these results, we can conclude that important variations may occur between the diurnal and the nocturnal intervals, in terms of both wind velocity and direction, while on a regional scale the northern parts of the Black and the Caspian seas seem to present more consistent wind energy potential. Moreover, this potential is comparable with that from the locations where such offshore wind farms already successfully operate.