Comparative Analysis of Wind Speed Distribution Models: A Case Study of Libya

In light of contemporary efforts to reduce the effects of fossil fuels on the environment and climate changes, investigation of the wind energy has a special value. Libya has abundant fossil fuel but also has the potential of using renewable energy (wind and solar). In the available literature, wind data for different sites in Libya have been analyzed using exclusively the Weibull distribution function. That was the motivation to expand the research by using four other functions, the Rayleigh, Lognormal, Gamma, and Logistic distributions, besides the Weibull one. In this paper, a thorough study of the wind power potential is presented using measurement data from four locations in Libya: Murzuq, Sabha, Tripoli, and Tarhuna. The five distribution functions have been applied to the one-year wind speed data and validated with five different Goodness-of-Fit (GoF) tests. Probability distribution graphs and GoF test results are shown. The results were ranked and the three functions with the best fit were selected. The results show that the Weibull is the top one, while the Gamma distribution and Rayleigh are following.