Offshore Wind Energy Estimation in the Bay of Bengal with Satellite Wind Measurement

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to obtain appropriate offshore location in the Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh for further development of wind energy. Through analyzing the previous published works, no offshore wind energy estimation has been found related to the Bay of Bengal. Therefore, this study can be claimed as the first footstep towards offshore wind energy analysis for this region. Generally, it is difficult to find offshore wind data relative to the wind turbine hub heights, thus a starting point is necessary to identify the possible wind power density of the region. In such scenario, Synthetic Aperture radars (SAR) have proven useful in previous studies. In this study, SAR based dataset- ENVISAT ASAR has been used for Wind Atlas generation of the Bay of Bengal. Furthermore, a comparative study has been performed with Global Wind Atlas (GWA) to determine a potential offshore wind farm production in a reasonable location at the bay. The annual energy production of that offshore windfarm has been analyzed by combining SAR, GWA and ASCAT datasets. Through ASAR based Wind Atlas and GWA comparison, some differences have been found where there are less samples from the ASAR datasets. Thus, Weibull statistical analysis are performed to have a better Weibull fitting and accurate estimation of Annual Energy production (AEP). The study summarizes that, satellite datasets can be a very useful method to detect potential zone if compared with any long time statistical result and bathymetry data together.