Technical and economic viability of a wind farm installed in a windy area of Algerian western south region

This paper presents a technical–economic study of a wind farm with a capacity of 40.04 MW located in the southwestern part of Algeria, precisely at Aoulef region in Adrar. The selection of sites was based on the information gathered through the Algerian Atlas wind map and also through the geographical information system (GIS). This one helps to manipulate a large number of geographical data, GIS allows to select optimal wind farm locations on the mesoscale coverage, best locations of wind turbine generators on the microscale coverage was conducted by a strong wind software tools. The results demonstrate that the wind farm with the capacity of 40.04 MW, comprising 13 wind turbine generators, each one with the capacity of 3.08 MW implemented in site 2, is the most profitable in terms of cost and efficiency. The gross annual production of this wind farm is 87,300 MWh, but if we take into consideration the wake losses, energy losses on energy transport, and distribution lines as well as mandatory downtime, we get an annual net production of 82,935 MWh, which corresponds to a levelized cost of energy of 8.46 DA/kWh.