HOMER analysis for integrating wind energy into the grid in southern of Algeria

Wind is an alternative energy resource, which is clean, inexhaustible and environmentally friendly. In this paper, an investigation is made on large-scale operations of 95 MW per day wind energy system (WES) as a grid power generation consisting of wind energy. A comparison is drawn between a grid-connected wind energy system GCWES and a standard grid operation focusing on environmental and economic impacts. Emissions and the wind energy generation fraction (RF) of total energy consumption are calculated as the main environmental indicator. Costs including net present cost (NPC), cost of energy (COE) and payback period are calculated for economic evaluation. To simulate the WES, the hourly wind speed data from InSalah (27° 09\´ 00" N, 2° 27\´ 38 E) of Algeria, are used as an example of a typical arid climate. HOMER is used for simulation. It is found that the optimum results of GCWES show a 19% reduction of emissions including CO2, SO2 and NOx. The RF of the optimized system is 19%. It is also found that the reduced NPC and COE are only equal to about 81% of energy consumption from standard grid and a payback is equal to 5.77 years. In addition, through a set of sensitivity analysis it is found that the wind speed has more effects on the environmental and economic performance of a GCWES.