Evaluation of the wind resource and power performance of a turbine in Tenerife

Tenerife, the largest of the Canary Islands, aims to enhance the contribution of renewable energies to its electricity demand. The objective of this work is twofold: (i) to assess the wind resources and (ii) to evaluate the energy that a specific wind turbine would produce at different locations across the island. Wind data from four meteorological stations covering a period of 91 years (1920-2011) are used. The annual and monthly distributions of wind velocity and power density are evaluated using the Weibull and Rayleigh distributions, and the prevailing wind directions are analyzed. The monthly energy generated by an ideal turbine is compared to that generated by a real turbine for the four study sites. (An ideal turbine extracts all the energy available in the wind, whereas a real turbine is subjected to Betz' law.) The high availability and capacity factors obtained are indicative of the large wind resource in Tenerife and in particular at three of the four study sites.