Wind shear analysis for different wind turbine hub heights in a western himalayan terrain

Abstract

Wind is one of the rapidly growing renewable energy sources for power generation worldwide. The determination of wind speed at different hub heights is important to assess the feasibility of wind turbines for power generation at a particular location. The objective of the present study is to determine the wind resource and wind power law exponent which is an important parameter to estimate the wind speeds at different turbine hub heights for power generation in western Himalayan terrain. In this study the wind resource potential at 20m to 150m hub heights is determined using wind shear analysis for the 12 locations in the western Himalayan terrain. The power exponent (α) for this region found to be as 0.3. The wind speeds at these turbine hub heights are found to be range 2.03-8.08m/s which shows that the wind resource is not suitable for large scale wind power generation however this resource can be utilized for power generation through standalone micro wind turbines or as a component of a PV based hybrid systems which is an important parameter to estimate wind speeds at different wind turbine hub heights in the region