Today, wind energy satisfies less than one percent of the world's energy needs, but it is one of the fastest growing industries for electricity production. A significant advantage of renewable energy sources is that they contribute to the reduction of greenhouse gases and this brings positive effects on the quality of the environment. The diploma thesis presents the operation of wind farms with special emphasis on small wind farms. In the initial chapters, we presented the history of wind farms, their structure and types. We then described in detail the small wind farms and their basic operating components, where we used the physical equation for wind energy and converted it into an equation to calculate the output power of the wind turbine and used it later in the analysis. In the continuation of the diploma work, we presented the economic justification of setting up the actual model of the small wind farm E-200L at the meteorological location Lisca. For a specific location, we analyzed production over the years and estimated the power of the E-200L wind turbine with the help of data on average wind speeds obtained from the website of the Environmental Agency of the Republic of Slovenia (ARSO) and the operating characteristics of the wind turbine model. Based on the annual amount of electricity and the calculation of cash flow through the life of the wind farm, we evaluated the economic feasibility of the investment. We used the Microsoft Excel to help us with the calculations.
The analysis of production over the year has shown that the model of the E-200L wind turbine annually produces approximately 18,9 MWh of electricity at the Lisca location, the installed power factor is around 21 %. From an economic point of view, it turned out that our investment is not worthwhile and therefore does not justify economically, a significantly influential figure was the excessive price of small wind farms.
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