Design and Simulation of Wind Energy System in Saudi Arabia

This paper introduces an accurate procedure to choose the best site from many sites and suitable wind turbines for these sites depending on the minimum price of kWh generated (Energy Cost Figure (ECF)) from wind energy system. In this paper a new proposed computer program has been introduced to perform all the calculations and optimization required to accurately design the wind energy system and matching between sites and wind turbines. Also, the market available software such as Homer, RetScrean, and etc. are not flexible enough to change the cost calculations and it is not able to extract much information as those available from the new proposed computer program. The data for five sites in Saudi Arabia and hundred wind turbines have been used to choose the best site and the optimum wind turbine for each site. These sites are Yanbou, Dhahran, Douhlom, Riyadh, and Qayssuma. One hundred wind turbines have been used to choose the best one for each site. This program is built in a generic form which allows it to be used with unlimited number of sites and wind turbines in all over the world. The program is written by using Visual Fortran and it is verified with simple calculation in Excel. The paper showed that the best site is Dhahran and the suitable wind turbine for this site is KMWERNO with 5.848167 Cents/kWh. The worst site to install wind energy system is Riyadh with minimum price of kWh of 12.812720 Cents/kWh in case of using GE Energy 2 wind turbine.