Wind speed description and power density in northern Spain

Wind resources are increasingly being investigated as a clean alternative for generating energy. This paper analyses the daily wind speed recorded at 46 automatic weather stations located in Navarre, northern Spain, in 2005-2015. Key points are the surface density of stations and the range of time that ensure a faithful depiction of wind speed together with surface calculations from image analysis and correlation with height. Different statistics were used. Median wind speed at 10 m was low, about 3.3 m s−1 and its interquartile range was narrow, about 2.3 m s−1. Nearly half the surface shows a median wind speed above 3.0 m s−1. The method of moments was employed to calculate the parameters of the Weibull distribution. Around half of the surface presented a shape parameter above 2.25 and the scale parameter was above 4 m s−1 for nearly 41% of the region. Although wind resources are not suitable for wind turbine applications in most of the region, since the wind speed is low in low-lying areas, about 12% of the region is suitable for stand-alone applications and, moreover, a substantial part of the region, around 23%, presents satisfactory wind resources for the installation of wind turbines.