Assesment of wind energy potential over Turkey in the 21st century by using regional climate model coupled with micro scale model

Energy, which is inseparable part of our life and is one of the basic requirements of all our activities from industry, technology, transportation, and health, has been gaining importance since industry revolution at 18th century. After the industrial revolution, it became very curial and our demand continues to increase with each passing day. Firstly, burning of fossil fuels used to fulfill the needs of energy. We are facing with climate change and global warming concept whose importance has emphasized much more nowadays. Even at this stage, it started to affect our lives and will affect our lives more deeply at near future. Widespread usage of fossil fuels causes to exceed the threshold of carbon emissions, which we have never witnessed before, and to increase the greenhouse effect. Briefly, it causes global warming and increasing temperatures. Hence the importance of new technologies and usage of renewable energy have come into prominence. At this moment, wind energy has the lion's share in usage of energy pool, and is expected to have biggest share in the future. Due to low cost of wind energy investment and high benefit obtained from installation of wind energy within all renewable energy sources, wind energy come forward compared to other sources. The changes in speed and direction of wind that is the most important factor of that resource, significantly affect determination of the resource location, production and upcoming whole processes. For this reason, changes in the wind speed and direction should be examined and determined along with seasonal, annual and long term changes for the wind energy capacity of the region and the optimization of the extracted power. In this study, the changes in wind speed, wind direction and wind energy were examined by using high resolution simulation results of regional climate model RegCM4.3 driven by global climate model MPI-EMS-MR until 2100. In the first section of the thesis, 6 different wind potential maps that are prepared by different organizations and have different resolutions and different heights are examined, and the similarities of the wind patterns with referance period are analyzed over Turkey. Even though the maps show the wind potentials at different times and heights, high wind potential areas of the simulations are consistent with literature. The wind speed and wind power density changes in future periods were determined on the basis of the reference period and anomalies are drawn for each period was examined as a percentages. GWEC, EWEA and TUREB are conducting comprehensive and unifying works in wind and wind energy on World, Europe and Turkey. In the first part of the work, published reports of these 3 major leading companies have been examined. According to the statistics within last few decades, the wind energy sector has grown continuously in the World, Europe and Turkey, and installed power has been increased compared to the previous years and become the largest partner of renewable energy group in meeting energy needs of the societies. In this framework, future expectations of the wind energy industries have been put forward by leading organizations for the target years of 2020, 2030 and 2050. The results reveals that the increase of wind energy usage will continue, even if at this rate, %50 of energy needs will be expected to come from renewable sources by 2050. In 2013, Turkey has been targeted to have 20 GW of the production of energy from wind by 2023. In the first part of the study, three wind power density atlases prepared in 1984, by MGM and by REPA project are examined in detail even though they belong to different heights and different solutions because of the lack of resources to compare with the climate simulations. Dynamically interpolated 10 km resolution MPI-EMS-MR model outputs were analyzed for 1971-2000 referance period, and future periods of 2021-2040, 2041-2070, 2071-2100 under RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5 scenarios. The long term avarages of the wind speed and wind energy density at heights of 50m, 80m, 100m and 200m are calculated fort he referance and future periods on seasonal and annual time scales. Then the wind speed anomalies of RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5 scenario results with respect to the referance were analyzed for the periods 2021- 2040, 2041- 2070, 2071-2100. In this study, only 80 m and 200 m results are shown. We divided the referance period three decades (1971-1980, 1981-1990 and 1991-2000) and investigated the differences. It is found that the changes in the wind speed and wind energy potential within decades are not significant. Therefore, we split the period times 30 years chunks like 1971-2000, 2021-2040, 2041-2070,2071-2100 to identify the difference and compare the results with the previous studies. Bandırma and its surrunding area has been choosen as a pilot region to further downscale the cimate model results to high resolution by using micro scale model of WAsP wind analysis and evalution program. Since WAsP is driven with the data provied only one single point, closest grid of the regional climate model to Bandırma had been used and wind energy change in the local scale is calculated for referance and future periods at long term meteorological measurement, measurement mast and grid point. Results'compatibility were compared with regional climate model. In addition, long-term meteorological measurements, measurement mast and the value in grid points were moved to a referance point where high potential areas, so changes in average wind speed and wind speed density are examined. The results obtained by this study are similar to the previous studies findings espacially, in the western part of Turkey, at Aegean sea after 2070. We found that the wind speed and wind energy density along the shore line are expected to increase in the future. It is identified that this area also extends to the interior regions and especially in the middle of central Anatolia from The Aegean Sea have been identified. In addition Southeastern Anatolia has an increase in wind speed. Particularly in Mediterranean region and Eastern Anatolia region has been a serious decline in wind speed. These decreases in the wind speed are likely related to changes in the large-scale circulation as the Mediterranean area is projected to have less cyclonic influence and more anticyclonic conditions in the future. Also there is small changes in Black sea and around for different time periods.