New insights into the wind energy potential of the west Black Sea area based on the North Sea wind farms model

Abstract

This paper focuses on the energy potential of the Black Sea wind, with the ultimate goal of evaluating a possible location of a wind farm near the Western coast of the Black Sea. The model taken into account for the research investigation is based on the existing wind farms from North Sea geographical area. The study aims to evaluate the wind energy potential based on three parameters, according to existing mathematical models, namely wind speed, wind power density and annual electricity production. The calculation of wind speed, wind power density, and annual electricity production, for all geographical points considered in the North Sea and the Black Sea, was made on the basis of existing information in the ERA-Interim and SMHI databases, using own codes written in Matlab. The period analyzed was of about 20 years, between 1999 and 2018. Comparing the data obtained from the calculations, for the annual energy production, with those made available by the statistics, one could see that the results obtained are close. Following the calculations we noticed that the location of the wind farm could achieve a sufficiently large amount of energy, greater than the productivity of the current model farm, in term of the past values, but with lower efficiency than those obtained for the future of the current farm. One can conclude that such a wind farm can produce enough energy to supply an entire city, having a population up to 290000 inhabitants, and for which the energy consumption is about 0.42 TWh.

Keywords

• North Sea
• Black Sea
• Wind energy
• Wind farm
• Clean energy