Evaluation of wind resource potential in mountainous region considering morphometric terrain characteristics

Abstract

In South Korea, where 64% of the national territory is mountainous, good wind resources in inland areas are mostly situated in high mountain regions. To develop a wind farm in a mountain region, the sloping of mountains and their shielding from wind by the surrounding topology should be considered. It is generally most advantageous to install wind turbines along a ridge that is open in all directions. This article presents a methodology for evaluating suitable sites for wind farm development by identifying suitable ridges using morphometric analysis, while excluding the geographical and social environmental exclusion factors and superposing them on the wind resource map to find the area having a specific level or higher wind power density. The result of the proposed suitable site analysis and existing wind farms was assessed to verify the feasibility of the method of analyzing suitable sites on ridges. The wind resource potential in Gangwon Province when calculated using a method based on conventionally suitable site and the method based on ridge analysis was 9 and 5 GW, respectively. The result confirmed that the conventional area-based potential calculation without consideration of the morphometric terrain characteristics overestimated wind resource potential by around 80% compared to the ridge analysis method of calculation presented in this article.