Abstract
The global population is moving away from fossil fuel technologies due to their many disadvantages, such as air pollution, greenhouse gases emission, global warming, acid rain, health problems, and high costs. These disadvantages make fossil fuels unsustainable. As a result, renewable energy is becoming more attractive due to its steadily decreasing costs. Harnessing renewable energy promises to meet the present energy demands of the African continent. The enormous renewable energy potential available across the African continent remains largely untapped, especially for wind energy. However, marginal and fair wind speeds and power densities characterize African wind energy resulting in low and unsustainable power in many areas. This research develops a techno-economic model for wind energy cost analysis for a novel, Ferris wheel-based wind turbine. The model is used to techno-economically analyze the siting of wind turbine sites in low wind speed areas on the African continent. The wind turbine’s technical performance is characterized by calculating the annual energy production and the capacity factor using the wind Weibull probability distribution of the cities and theoretical power curve of the wind turbine. Its economic performance is evaluated using annualized financial return on investment, simple payback period, and levelized cost of electricity. The techno-economic model is validated for 21 African cities and shows that the Ferris wheel-based design is very competitive with four current, commercial wind turbines, as well as with other sources of energy. Hence, the new wind turbine may help provide the economical, clean, renewable energy that Africa needs.
Highlights
The challenge of providing an adequate and sufficient amount of energy for the populace is a global issue
600 million of these are in sub-Saharan Africa, which accounts for 70% of the sub-Saharan population [5,6,7,8]
To assess wind energy potential in the selected African countries, the Weibull distribution wind data for a spatial data layer with 1 km × 1 km resolution throughout the locations was acquired from the Global Wind Atlas (GWA) [21,57]
Summary
The challenge of providing an adequate and sufficient amount of energy for the populace is a global issue. It addresses many of the challenges associated with conventional wind turbines It poses to be a better technology for Africa because it can generate power at lower-rated wind speeds, higher cut-out speeds, lower weight to power ratios, reduced maintenance, installation, transportation and capital costs, greater ease of transportation, greater ease of erection because of its integrated lifting system, and lower levelized cost of electricity [32]. It explains how wind energy has been widely used as a source of power generation and discusses the reasons that wind energy is needed in the African energy mix, as well as potential for wind energy across the continent.
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