Exploring economy of small communities and households by investing on harnessing wind energy in the province of Sistan-Baluchestan in Iran

Abstract

The wind farm development is very slow in the developing countries particularly in the Middle East. This is attributed to many factors including economy of these countries which is mainly rely on fossil fuels and hence yields to low cost of energy, political and technological barriers, lack of wind potential studies or lack of high wind regions and more. This paper attempts to address these issues and foresees opportunities for developing household or small communities wind farms which can be rely on individual or small communities’ funds as well as creating job opportunities for them. As the case study, the province of Sistan-Baluchestan in Iran is considered to study how the economy of local communities or households can be strengthen by exploring small wind turbine developments for them. An economic and statistical analysis is conducted based on wind data for cities of Chabahar, Dehak, and Dalgan in the province. Wind energy characteristics and patterns are extensively explored for these cities from 473,040 wind data samples. This is resulted in the average annual wind power density of 181 W/m2, 158 W/m2, and 146 W/m2,for Chabahar, Dalgan, and Dehak, respectively at the height of 40 m. By considering five different commercial wind turbines, from 1.6 to 30 kW capacities, the total annual electrical power production, profits and payback time for each wind turbine is presented. It is concluded that nearly 90,000 households can benefit from profit of annual energy production of 225 GWh.