CURRENT SITUATION OF WIND ENERGY IN TURKEY AND ASSESMENT OF YALOVA’S WIND ENERGY POTENTIAL

Abstract

Accordingto the wind energy statistics, Turkey has indicated a significant developmentabout wind energy utilization in the last decade. But, it is the fact thatTurkey has utilized only 4% of its total technical wind energy potential.Moreover, in order to achieve the wind energy targets in 2023 wind energyexploration activities should be accelerated in every region of Turkey and windenergy utilization in Turkey should be increased. This study aims to determinethe wind energy characteristics of a site in Yalova, considering both thestatistical formulations in literature and also the one year hourly wind datain time series format which was obtained from the Turkish State MeteorologicalService (TSMS) in 2012. To achieve this goal, after having obtained all thewind characteristics of the location such as average wind speed, dominant winddirection, power density values, Weibull parameters (k and c) that act veryimportant role in determining the wind energy profile of any site arecalculated by applying one of the widely used methods to the present wind data.Finally, all the findings obtained from the study are discussed in terms ofquality and quantity.