Wind Potential Assessment in Urban Area of Surakarta City

Wind energy is one of the promising energy resource in urban area that has not been deeply explored in Indonesia. Generally the wind velocity in Indonesia is relatively low, however on the roof top of the high rise building in urban area the wind velocity is high enough to be converted for supporting the energy needs of the building. In this research a feasibility study of wind energy in urban area of Surakarta was done. The analysis of the wind energy potential on the height of 50 m was done by using Weibull distribution. The wind data based on the daily wind speed taken from 2011-2015. From the result of the wind speed analysis, a wind map in Surakarta was developed for helping to determine the places that have good potential in wind energy. The result showed that in five years the city of Surakarta had mean energy density (E-D) of 139.43 W/m(2), yearly energy available (E-I) of 1221.4 kWh/m(2)/year, the most frequent wind velocity (V-Fmax) of 4.79 m/s, and the velocity contributing the maximum energy (V-Emax) of 6.97 m/s. The direction of the wind was mostly from south, with frequency of 38%. The south and west area of the city had higher wind velocity than the other parts of the city. Also in those areas there are many high rise buildings, which are appropriate for installation of small wind turbine on the roof top (building mounted wind turbine/ BMWT).