Development of local area wind prediction system for selecting suitable site for windmill

Nowadays, environmental concerns on the causes of global warming have led to many countries to introduce renewable energy technologies like wind power. An appropriate selection of a suitable land for wind power plants can provide significant output of energy. The final goal of this study is to develop a numerical prediction model, based on computational wind engineering, as accurate as possible to predict wind energy distribution of a local area. It aims to develop a "local area wind energy prediction system" (hereafter LAWEPS). The works involved in this project are divided into three phases. In the initial phase of the study, a multi-step wind simulation with nesting method was designed. In the second phase of the work, each sub-model was coded and evaluated. Data of observation and experiment are obtained in parallel and used for verification with computation. At the present stage of the final phase of the project, the performance of the entire simulation system, LAWEPS, is tested and examined by comparing its results with measured data. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models for meteorological phenomena and building scale phenomena are developed within LAWEPS for large and small areas, respectively. Results obtained from LAWEPS are promising and stimulating. This paper reports on the current status of this project and highlights on the achievements obtained within this study so far.