WSEAS Transactions on Mathematics
Print ISSN: 1109-2769, E-ISSN: 2224-2880
Volume 11, 2012
On Spatial Analysis of Wind Energy Potential in Malaysia
Authors: , , , ,
Abstract: Statistical distribution for describing the wind speed at a particular location provides information about the wind energy potential. In this paper, nine different statistical distributions are fitted to the data of average hourly wind speed for 60 wind stations across the west and east Malaysia from the year 2000 to 2009. The distributions found to be most adequate for describing the wind speed at each particular station are determined based on several goodness of fits criteria. The spatial dependence in the data is investigated by making use of the semivariogram involving the expected speed found using the identified distribution for each individual station. Since the spatial dependence in the data of Peninsular Malaysia could not be described well by the semivariogram, the inverse distance weighting method is used for describing the spatial distribution of wind speed. For the data of East Malaysia, however, the power semivariogram is found to be fitted quite well. Accordingly, the kriging method is applied for spatial prediction. It is found that, the regions in the northeast, northwest and southeast of the peninsula have a good potential for wind energy. For East Malaysia, the northeast and southwest regions of Sarawak are found to be the most potential.
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Keywords: Wind energy, wind speed distribution, semivariogram, spatial estimation, kriging, inverse distance weighting method