An Accurate Estimation of the Commercial Wind Energy Potential of Middle East Region

The Middle East is in a rapid quest to reduce the dependency on oil resources to meet the region’s increasing energy demand and to bring down carbon emissions. The region as on 2018 has got only 20.03 GW Renewable Energy (RE) capacity in their energy mix and its share towards the total REcapacity of the world stands at 0.85%. Although the region has got great potential in tapping the abundant wind energy resources, the installed wind energy capacity of the region is only 612MW. This paper analyses the commercial wind energy potential of three representative sites in the Middle East. The Maximum likelihood estimation method is used to attain Weibull distribution parameters and subsequently, wind power densities at a height of 50m is estimated for all the three locations. Three commercial wind turbines of different power ratings are selected for assessing the annual energy output as well as capacity factor at each of the three sites.