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Offshore wind energy potential for Bahrain via multi-criteria evaluation

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journal contribution
posted on 2020-05-11, 08:24 authored by Mohamed Elgabiri, Diane Palmer, Hanan Al Buflasa, Murray ThomsonMurray Thomson
Current global commitments to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases encourage national targets for renewable generation. Due to its small land mass, offshore wind could help Bahrain to fulfill its obligations. However, no scoping study has yet been carried out. The methodology presented here addresses this research need. It employs Analytical Hierarchy Process and pairwise comparison methods in a Geographical Information Systems environment. Publicly available land use, infrastructure and transport data are used to exclude areas unsuitable for development due to physical and safety constraints. Meteorological and oceanic opportunities are ranked, then competing uses are analyzed to deliver optimal sites for wind farms. The potential annual wind energy yield is calculated by dividing the sum of optimal areas by a suitable turbine footprint, to deliver maximum turbine number. Ten favourable wind farm areas were identified in Bahrain’s territorial waters, representing about 4% of the total maritime area, and capable of supplying 2.68 TWh/yr of wind energy or almost 10% of the Kingdom’s annual electricity consumption. Detailed maps of potential sites for offshore wind construction are provided in the paper, giving an initial plan for installation in these locations.

Funding

This work was conducted within ‘Technical Integration of Sustainable Energy and Water (TISEW)’, a collaboration between Loughborough University and the University of Bahrain, supported by grant ID 279332548, under the UK-Gulf Institutional Links Programme. The grant is funded by the UK Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and delivered by the British Council.

History

School

  • Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering

Published in

Wind Engineering

Volume

45

Issue

4

Pages

838-856

Publisher

SAGE Publications

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Rights holder

© The authors

Publisher statement

This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Sage under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Licence (CC BY-NC). Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

Acceptance date

2020-04-23

Publication date

2020-12-19

Copyright date

2020

ISSN

0309-524X

eISSN

2048-402X

Language

  • en

Depositor

Diane Palmer. Deposit date: 7 May 2020

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