A Study on Wind Speed Distributions

Abstract

Owing to the growing environmental concern harnessing renewable energy sources became absolutely necessary like solar, wind etc. Wind energy is more sensitive to variations with topography and wind patterns compared to solar energy. The wind energy distribution is the basis for the assessment of wind energy potential needed for the design of wind farms. Accurate wind speed modeling is critical in estimating wind energy potential for harvesting wind power effectively. The quality of wind speed assessment depends on the capability of chosen pdf to describe the measured wind speed frequency. The objective of this study is to describe (model) wind speed characteristics using proposed generalized skew logistic distribution. In order to decide the most suitable site for installing a wind farm as well as to select a fitting wind turbine model it is necessary to carry out a careful wind energy resource evaluation. In this study we propose the generalized skew logistic distribution for the description of wind speed distribution. This distribution is flexible enough to accommodate the shape of wind speed data and include some well known distribution as special cases, also we evaluate the performance of this distribution by using wind speed data at Mupandal (1) at kanya kumari in India. Results show that this generalized skew logistic distribution is a better fit followed by WW pdf.