Zero-Cost Wind Project Planning

A high cost of licensed micro-siting software, a lack of reliable ground-based wind resource data and difficulty assessing geographically morphed areas of the country make it challenging for project developers in Nepal to perform preliminary siting and tangible evaluations of large-scale wind projects. Furthermore, areas with the most promising wind resource profiles in Nepal are usually located in rural and remote regions with poor accessibility and limited aggregated geographical data, and they are often isolated from electrical grid infrastructures. As such, identification of suitable locations for developing wind projects requires complex multi-criterion analysis, which in turn requires upfront investment. This article elaborates on a necessity-driven framework for wind farm siting and sizing that can process freely available project-specific parameters, geospatial data and factual information to identify project locations and produce quantitative figures for electricity generation.