Evaluation of the wind potential of a wide region using CFD

Energy is one of the most important things for the development of one nation and the day to day activities of human being. In recent years, interest in renewable energy has increased greatly worldwide , because of a number of reasons : low carbon emissions, constantly increase of the cost of hydrocarbons and its abundance . Among renewable sources of energy, wind energy is one of the most promising option, because its exploitation cost, in many situations, is comparable with the cost of electricity from fossil fuels. To reach economic viability of a wind energy installation, a very accurate resource assessment is required. The main objective with which the work has been carried out is to find the promising areas for wind turbine installations in the province of Parma using computational fluid dynamics by means of WindSim software. The secondary goal is to carry out a wind energy assessment of the entire province of Parma, to evaluate its overall wind energy potential. The following procedure is performed to build the wind map of the province: existing data collection, domain preparation, mesoscale simulations and detailed micro-siting considering legal and environmental restrictions: elevation higher than 1200 m, protected areas (sites of community importance and special protection areas) and proximity to electric grid lines and roads. Sensitivity analysis is carried out on a number of simulation parameters, such as boundary condition types, turbulence models, vertical cell height discretization, solver types and simulation domain selections. Based on the micro-siting simulation results, three municipalities of Parma (Berceto, Terenzo and Borgo Val di Taro) are selected and the optimal positions for 30 wind turbines are determined considering higher wind speed locations and dominant wind directions.