Survey of wind power potential for wind-based electricity at Makambako, Iringa Tanzania

The potential for wind-generated electricity is examined using 22 months wind data collected from a prospective site located in the southern highlands of Tanzania. While the data for the year 2001 was from March to December that of 2002 was for all the twelve months of the year. Characteristics of monthly and annual wind speed and direction are systematically investigated based on hourly time-series data using Windographer software. The Weibull shape factors k corresponding to a height of 50 m were found to be 3.10 and 3.80 while the scale factors c were 11.06 and 12.27 m/s for the years 2001 and 2002, respectively. The wind power potential at the location is established to be substantially high as the mean power density and energy content at the site are 8,788 and 6,839 W/m2, and 78,986 and 59,908 kWh/m2/yr, respectively, for the years 2001 and 2002. The large difference between the mean values for the two years is due to the fact that the set of data for first year was for a period of 10 months while that of the later year was for 12 months.