With a population of over 100 million, Ethiopia is the second-most populous country in sub-Saharan Africa. More than 80% of the population of Ethiopia lives in rural areas with low electrification rate, and a study shows that traditionally more than 90% of the households of the country use biomass as their primary fuel [
1,
2]. The problem is even worse in the North Shewa Zone of Amhara, Ethiopia. The country has an estimated exploitable wind potential of 10 GW [
3]. Although there is exploitable wind potential that is expected to be found in some of the case study areas, there has been no proper wind feasibility and potential assessment (PA). To address this, a proper feasibility and PA study is necessary for the Zone, which is helpful to attract the interested stakeholders and investors to involve themselves in implementing an off-grid or on-grid system in the area to solve the problem of lack of access to electricity. The main goal of this study is to assess wind energy potential of the North Shewa Zone.
1.2. Literature Review
Wind energy is emerging as one of the most viable alternatives to meet the challenge of increasing energy demand, particularly for electrical energy generation. It is clean, fuel free, and available almost in every country in the world and in abundance in off-shore. Wind energy is applicable for both power generation & water pumping applications for rural societies and to model the wind data researchers used different statistical methods and software for selecting wind turbine class, for forecasting site wind energy & power density, for developing site wind resource map, for preliminary wind turbine micro siting and for estimating farm annual energy production (AEP) [
4].
Currently Ethiopian Electric Power (EEP) is authorized for power generation in the country, and from the preliminary survey assessment, the country has a 45000 MW exploitable potential from hydropower, which is currently the country's primary source of electricity, while wind and geothermal energy have exploitable potentials of 10000 MW and 5000 MW, respectively. Besides this, the country has an estimated 5.26 kWh/m
2 solar potential [
5].The country currently has total generation capacity of 4250 MW. From this, the share of wind power generation is 8%, and the remaining 2% is shared by geothermal and diesel power plants.
If ongoing projects such as the renaissance dam which is the country's largest hydropower plant, geothermal and wind projects are completed within the next two to three years, the country's total capacity will reach 10,000 MW [
6]. As the country’s main energy generation source is hydropower and the amount of rainfall decreases from November to May each year, the generation will be reduced step by step. A good complementary alternate solution for this is wind power. Based on the previous completed wind power project experiences such as 51 MW of Adama I, 120 MW of Ashegoda, and 153 MW of Adama II wind farms, EEP has currently completed the feasibility study of the Ayisha I and Ayisha II wind projects in the Somali region, with each having a potential capacity of 120 MW. Currently, construction is under way [
3].
Wind energy potential assessment had been investigated in four Ethiopian areas, such as Addis Ababa, Nazret, Mekele, and Debrezeit, by compiling data from different sources and analysing it using a software tool. The results relating to wind energy potential are given in terms of the monthly average wind speed, wind speed probability density function (PDF), wind speed cumulative density function (CDF), and wind speed duration curve (DC). According to the results, for three of the four locations, the wind energy potential is reasonable [
7].
Though non-government organizations (NGO) installed micro-wind turbines in some selected districts of North Shewa for a few farmers for lighting purposes, there is no published paper on the potential assessment of wind in this area. One of the previous studies in the Amhara region is presented in [
6]. Although the installed capacity of wind has recently increased and it is now second in rank to hydroelectric power, there are a few factors such as icing, extreme wind speed, permafrost, sea ice, and others that are affecting globally the coverage of wind generation. However, the authors of [
8] concluded that these factors do not jeopardize the exploitation of wind resources in northern Europe. Wind power installation capacity for selected countries was studied in [
9], and Germany, Spain, the United States, India, Denmark, and China were the highest the world's leading wind energy producers from 1997 to 2006. Chinese has been the leading market with installed capacity of 21.2 GW since 2008 and according to the 2018 global wind report world wind total installation capacity both onshore and offshore reaches 591 GW [
10]. Recently, there have been various methods for determining the potential of wind resources, such as wind resource mapping, trees and vegetation as biological indicators of wind potential, advanced numerical weather prediction models, techno-environmental and economic feasibility analysis, the weibull function to model the wind behaviour using actual meteorological data using these methods different countries can easily identify the wind resource potential in a particular area and moreover uses these methods to study the effect of different weather data on the generated annual electricity production (AEP) and helps in wind forecasting which used to reduce the problems in the grid were discussed in [
11,
12,
13,
14,
15,
16,
17,
18]. Moreover, according to the special report of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), studying on renewable energy such as wind has a great role for climate change mitigation to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases due to the release of carbon, as was discussed in [
19,
20].
As solar energy is one of the creators of wind resources, the authors of [
21] previously studied potential assessment of solar resources in the case study areas. In wind potential assessment, studying the mathematical expression for the Weibull probability density function, wind power density in W/m
2 by extrapolating from different heights such as 10 m to 50 m etc. and studying wind speed frequency distribution analysis will make the assessment more reliable and discussed in [
22,
23,
24,
25,
26,
27,
28]. One of the international laws forced to mitigate global warming, this will also be achieved by studying and implementing renewable energy resources such as wind according to the Paris Agreement to make carbon emissions zero by 2050. This will support achieving climate stabilization goals by 2050, which will support reducing GHG emissions and in reducing global temperature for sustainable development goals (SDG) and clean economic development and to mitigate approximately million tons of carbon dioxide and some countries, such as Nepal plans and motivates a 15% increase in national energy use from renewables with a reduction of 23% of CO
2 emissions by 2030, were discussed in [
29,
30,
31,
32,
33,
34]. To achieve this goal, everybody across the globe should keep its footprint. The study here also on potential assessment in the case study area will aid in mitigating the carbon emissions as more than 80% of the population have no access to electricity and still rely on traditional biomass to cook food, which is another environmental pollution crisis against the carbon reduction policy of the world agreement.
Recently, wind power turbine technology is growing day by day, as some literature shows, it will be possible to generate wind power from low-rated wind speed regions by enhancing wind turbine technology. In [
35], low-wind-speed regions are taken into account as a feasible option to generate electricity. In the study, the feasibility of a wind power plant in a low-rated wind speed region is investigated, and it is found out that it can also be feasible to install wind power plants in low-rated wind speed regions as the wind turbine technology enhances. In [
36] using the statistical two-parameter weibull probability density function method, wind speed data retrieved from an indigenous oceanography company and the global information system (GIS) were analysed for wind energy harvest, and the coastal and offshore sites of wind power potential were compared. The findings from the study showed that the offshore sites have four times greater wind power potential than the coastal sites. Assessing and knowing wind potential has not only have the advantage of application in generation electric energy, in [
37] the application of wind in appropriate type of double fed induction generator (DFIG) type wind turbine is investigated to control frequency and power system oscillation of a system in the grid.
As per studying in the literature review, studying and implementing wind potential assessments has great contribution for both reducing carbon emission and economic development. In this regard, the authors of this article are motivated to contribute to the world's zero carbon emission by 2050 by some amount and considered one of the study areas, which is the North Shewa Zone in the Amhara region of Ethiopia, as the best and most convenient site in such a way that 100-150 households settle in the same place in the rural area, and the other settlements are indigenous family groups with 10-15 households in the case study area, mostly living in hilly sites. This will make easier the installation if potential investors need to install wind turbines after a successful feasibility and potential assessment.
The remaining sections of the paper are arranged as, the materials and methodology including study area descriptions is discussed in
Section 2. The results of the test studies and discussions are presented in
Section 3. The concluding highlights of the paper are described in
Section 4 and finally the scope of the research and future directions are described in
Section 5.