Abstract

Many studies have found that wind speed is the most significant parameter of wind power. Thus, an accurate determination of the probability distribution of wind speed is an important parameter to measure before estimating the wind energy potential over a particular region. Utilizing an accurate distribution will minimize the uncertainty in wind resource estimates and improve the site assessment phase of planning. In general, different regions have different wind regimes. Hence, it is reasonable that different wind distributions will be found for different regions. Because it is reasonable to consider that wind regimes vary according to the region of a particular country, nine different statistical distributions have been fitted to the mean hourly wind speed data from 20 wind stations in East Malaysia, for the period from 2000 to 2009. The values from Kolmogorov-Smirnov statistic, Akaike’s Information Criteria, Bayesian Information Criteria and R² correlation coefficient were compared with the distributions to determine the best fit for describing the observed data. A good fit for most of the stations in East Malaysia was found using the Gamma and Burr distributions, though there was no clear pattern observed for all regions in East Malaysia. However, the Gamma distribution was a clear fit to the data from all stations in southern Sabah.

Keywords:

Goodness of fit, spatial pattern, wind energy, wind regime, wind speed distribution,

References

Competing interests

The authors have no competing interests.

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The authors have no competing interests.