STATISTICAL ESTIMATION OF MEAN WIND ENERGY AVAILABLE IN WESTERN REGION OF CAMEROON: CASE OF THE BAFOUSSAM'S CITY
Abstract

Author(s): Marinette G. Jeutho, Fabien Kenmogne and David Yemélé

Wind plays a crucial role in many physical applications such as wind energy explorations, pollutants transport and diffusion. Wind is considered to be highly variable from both of temporal and geogra phical point of views. This is why this paper deals with the investigation of wind potential energy in one of the most important city of Cameroon, the Bafoussam's city of the western region, with the data obtained both from the Bafoussam airport and the NASA meteorological services. By the using of the maximum entropy principle (MEP) we have derived a family of pre-exponential distributions in order to describe wind speed probability distributions. The statistical performances of the developed distributions are compared with those of the conventional Weibull distributions. As a result it has been found that Bafoussam is the low potential site for installing wind turbine. The average annually wind speed within the chosen time interval being 1.6 m/s, which can be classified as class 1, according to the international system wind classification. Moreover, the result shows that the night time is the windy time, while 22h30 is the windiest moment.