Economic analysis of potential of electricity generation
In this section, an economic analysis is applied to determine
whether the investment project is feasible to install some wind
turbines in the central region of Thailand. The turbine cost is the
largest proportion of the investment cost. For commercial turbines
in the market, it is practically estimated to be 1.34 million US$ per
1MW[35]. Accordingly, the initial investment cost, operation and
maintenance cost, and financial benefits are determined from the
Appendix. Other numerical values of financial parameters are
listed in Table 4.
There are three sizes of the commercial wind turbines in this
study, which are VestasTM: V47 660 kW (T1), V60 850 kW (T2),
and V82 1650 kW (T3) [36]. They are used to assess economic feasibility
for installation at all three sites at a height of 120 m. In this
work, the wind turbine models are chosen, based on not only availability
but also reliability of information about the specifications of
the power curves. Other types of commercial wind turbine models
in the market may be more suitable than the ones used in this feasibility
study, for example, a wind turbine, that is specially
designed for low speed wind, but its specification is not available
in the literature. However, the proposed methodology can be generalized
further in economic analysis for all types of wind turbines.
The specifications of the wind turbines are given in the Table 5.
Also, Fig. 7 illustrates the power output functions of the wind turbines
against the wind speed, which are available by the manufacturer
[36].
Table 6 reports the annual mean wind speed at the hub heights
of each wind turbine. They are interpolated or extrapolated from
the measured data of wind by applying the power law equation