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Offshore wind energy potential for Bahrain via multi-criteria evaluation
journal contribution
posted on 2020-05-11, 08:24 authored by Mohamed Elgabiri, Diane Palmer, Hanan Al Buflasa, Murray ThomsonMurray ThomsonCurrent 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 EngineeringVolume
45Issue
4Pages
838-856Publisher
SAGE PublicationsVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Rights holder
© The authorsPublisher 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
2020-04-23Publication date
2020-12-19Copyright date
2020ISSN
0309-524XeISSN
2048-402XPublisher version
Language
- en
Depositor
Diane Palmer. Deposit date: 7 May 2020Usage metrics
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