Technical Feasibility of Large-scale Wind Energy Production in Eritrea

With the rapid depletion of fossil fuels and alarming environmental concerns renewable energy utilization is becoming the best option for electricity production. Moreover, renewable electricity production from wind energy has become a notable objective globally for its enormous potential and technological advancement. The main objective of this paper is to investigate the technical feasibility of large-scale wind power production in Eritrea. The study was carried-out based on two different data sources (measured and modeled) containing time-series of weather data and a third reference data from Global Wind Atlas (GWA) was used for validation purposes. The characteristics and distribution of the wind speed for all data sets were described using Weibull distribution. Two turbines (Enercon E-82 and Vestas V90) were selected to test their performance in the proposed sites. Weibull distribution - representative of the original data sets- along with the turbines’ power curves were used to determine the Annual Energy Production (AEP) and capacity factor (Cf) of the turbines. The Vestas wind turbine was found to have a better performance compared to Enercon turbine in both sites for all data sets. Furthermore, the influence of air density in AEP and Cf was investigated and the finding showed that as much as 12% variation on AEP was obtained in Dekemhare site which is located in the highlands of Eritrea. Though the variation between the measured and modeled data sets exists in both sites, the difference in mean wind speed, power density, AEP and Cf was more exaggerated for Dekemahre site. Referring to the measured data series both sites found to be very attractive for utility scale wind power production