A comparative study to analyze wind potential of different wind corridors

The rollout of China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) has benefited Pakistan in getting a faster pace in terms of economic and financial stability. Pakistan has a significant geographical location in the Asian continent. It possesses an enormous renewable energy sources (RES) potential, primarily wind, in its Sindh, Balochistan, and Khyber Pakhtun-Khuwa (KPK) provinces. This study concentrates on the availability of wind power potential at the selected twelve sites located in three different provinces of the country, using the Weibull probability distribution (WPD) technique. Five parametric estimation techniques were simulated on the data sets of the selected wind sites to find the optimal results. The obtained results showed that the annual wind energy density was found to be 3668.28 kWh/m2at Lucky Energy, 3297.21 kWh/m2at Sujawal, 3180.03 kWh/m2at Tando Ghulam Ali, 2836.76 kWh/m2at Sanghar, 2821.09 kWh/m2at Baburband, 2684.32 kWh/m2at Ketibandar, 2618.78 kWh/m2at Umerkot, 1759.2 kWh/m2Hawksby, 1253.76 kWh/m2at Gwadar, 896.41 kWh/m2at Quetta, 558.59 kWh/m2at Haripur and 376.07 kWh/m2at Peshawar respectively. From the results, it is found that sites present in Sindh province are suitable for commercial-scale wind farm development and the selected wind sites of Balochistan are appropriate for utility-scale wind power development. In contrast, the selected wind sites of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province are unsuitable for commercial scale due to low wind speeds around the year.