Multiple Reanalysis Datasets Validation, Wind Resource Assessment and Technoeconomic Analysis of a Wind Farm for Offshore Island in the Exclusive Economic Zone.

Abstract

Pakistan’s crippling economy is currently grappling with the challenges posed by addressing climate change impacts and ensuring energy security. Country’s high reliance on the fossil fuel imports pose sustainability challenges that has negative consequences of depleting foreign exchange reserves, inflation and reducing exports competitiveness by exposing the country’s economy to the volatility in international energy prices. Although, government has taken incentivized measures for the growth of renewable energy market, yet renewable share in the overall installed electricity capacity amounts to only 6.8 percent. Pakistan has tremendous wind resource potential, possessing renowned wind corridors and average wind speeds of 7.87 m/s in the windiest 10% of its regions, yet the country’s overall installed capacity for wind power has reached only 590.5 MW to overcome energy crisis. To address the challenges of Pakistan’s crippling economy, and ensuring energy security, further expansion in the wind energy sector is required, particularly offshore wind energy that is underexploited. Therefore, in this study, comprehensive methodology was adopted for assessing wind resource characteristics of the offshore island using long term 23 years ERA-5 wind data spanning years 2000-2022. Afterwards, comprehensive technoeconomic feasibility analysis of a 50 MW wind farm is carried out to examine the financial bankability of the optimized wind farm. The average annual wind speed of Bundle Island is found to be 6.49 m/s. The wind farm’s capacity factor consisting of optimally selected wind turbine Gamesa G114 2MW is 33.3%. Optimized layout for wind farm consists of row spacing 8Do, turbine spacing 8Do, offset for rows 2Do and row orientation 40o . The NPV, LCOE, IRR, and PBP for the project are found out to be $10,260,925, $0.041, 32.39% and 3 years respectively. These results indicate that the project is financially highly profitable under historical average inflation rate conditions.