Some of the design and methodology considerations in wind resource assessment

Owing to the increasing power demand and the environmental concerns of the conventional power sources, power generation from wind is receiving due attention from majority of power planners. Since wind is an intermittent energy source and to find the economic viability of wind project, a proper wind resource assessment (WRA) and analysis of the data collected is very important. An extensive literature survey on WRA is carried out and the different techniques of WRA are discussed. The methodology includes discussions on preliminary wind survey to choose the best site for installing wind data instruments, selecting the optimum wind turbine suitable for a site and the uncertainties involved in estimating the wind speed using the different WRA techniques.