Thermodynamic Analysis of Wind Energy Systems

This chapter studies the efficiency performance of wind energy systems evaluated by energy and exergy analyses. The theories of energy and exergy analyses along with efficiency calculation for horizontal-axis wind turbines (WTs) are provided by a lucid explanation. A 1.5 MW WT is selected for the thermodynamic analysis using reanalyzed meteorological data retrieved from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications, Version 2 (MERRA-2), data set. Matlab scripts are developed to calculate the energy and exergy efficiencies using the MERRA-2 data set. The energy efficiency presents higher magnitude than the exergy efficiency based on the theoretical derivation and the calculated time series of efficiencies. Comparison of impacts of four meteorological variables (wind speed, pressure, temperature, and humidity ratio) on WT efficiencies shows that although wind speed dominates the turbine's efficiency performance, other meteorological variables also play important roles. In addition, uncertainties of the meteorological variables are represented by the best-fit distributions, which are critically important for evaluating the reliability of wind power performance considering realistic meteorological uncertainty.