Technical Analysis and Comparative Study of three Wind Turbines for a 50MW wind farm in Laayoune City Morocco

Abstract

Wind energy is in the spotlight, it is nowadays the fastest growing source of energy in the world. The objective of this work is to examine wind power potential of Laayoune site using wind speed, wind direction, and other meteorological data collected during one year. This type of complete examination provides information of wind characteristics of potential sites and helps in choosing appropriate wind turbine. In the first part, we have been present a comparison of three methods for estimating parameters of Weibull distribution function wind speed data namely Standard Deviation , Least Squares and Mabchour’s. The comparison has been done using Excel sheet and ALWIN software. In second part, we have been compare three various wind turbines: WES 18-100KW, XANT M-21 100KW and Northem Power NPS 21- 100K for the production of a 50MW electric power from wind energy farm installed in Laayoune city. The criteria of turbine choice is based on the price per kilowatt hour and the higher annual production. The simulation results using HOMER and ALWIN software showed that the wind turbine: XANT M-21 100KW has the higher annual production with low cost of installation.