Assessment of wind energy prospect by Weibull distribution for prospective wind sites in Australia

In this study, three potential wind sites such as Hamilton Island, Proserpine, and South Johnstone wind speed data has been analyzed using Weibull distribution. The half-hourly time series wind speed data used in this analysis were obtained from Bureau of Meteorology, Australia wind monitoring stations. With the aim assessing the wind energy potential, method of moments (MOM), empirical method (EM), and power density method (PDM) were employed for determining the Weibull factors of the available data. The accuracy of the results was analyzed using a statistical test tool named chi-square error (χ2). The EM method was found to be the best method among the three studied methods for calculating Weibull parameters. Based on the analyzed data, a horizontal axis wind turbine specification was proposed. Finally, wind power profile of Hamilton Island site was evaluated for the proposed turbine specification. © 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.