Published on July 2020 | Wind Energy, Wind Farm Clusters

Development of Wind Energy in India and a Stratagem for Analyzing Performance of Wind Farm Clusters

With maturity of stepping-up technologies and immediate requirement for maintaining a healthy environment with minimal price, India is moving towards a bias of generating electricity from renewable resources. Wind energy production, with its relatively safer and positive environmental characteristics, has evolved from a marginal activity into a multibillion dollar industry today. Wind energy power plants, also known as wind farms, comprises of multiple wind turbines. Though there are several wind-mill agglomeration producing energy in different geographical locations across the world, evaluating their performance is a complex task and is an important focus for stakeholders. In this work an attempt is made to estimate the performance of wind clusters employing a multi- criteria approach. Multiple factors that affect wind farm operations are analyzed by taking experts opinions, and a performance ranking of the wind farms is generated. The weights of the selection criteria are determined by pairwise comparison matrices of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). The proposed methodology evaluates wind farm performance based on technical, economic, environmental, and sociological indicators. Both qualitative and quantitative parameters were considered. Empirical data were collected through questionnaire from the selected wind farms of Belagavi district in the Indian State of Karnataka. This proposed methodology is a useful tool for cluster analysis.