Assessment of the Wind Energy Potential in Bangladesh

In light of waning natural gas reserves coupled with a steadily and rapidly growing demand for power as more people gain access to electricity, the Government of Bangladesh (GOB) is assessing various paths to provide reliable, affordable, and accessible power to its citizens. One path includes quickly ramping up coal power to 50% of generation capacity, but another, less carbon-intensive path supported by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) would be to develop renewable energy as a substantial portion of their portfolio. Some small solar farms have been built in Bangladesh, but as land is a scarce resource in such a densely populated country (165 million people in an area about the size of Iowa), wind power is more attractive due to its comparatively small footprint. Static maps exist that show the results of prior wind resource assessments in Bangladesh, but these assessments lack wind measurements at typical modern wind turbine hub heights, and do not account for potential power output from new types of wind turbines that are specifically designed for low-wind regimes like Bangladesh.

In this USAID-funded project, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) led a team that developed the most comprehensive wind energy resource assessment to date in Bangladesh. NREL and Harness Energy acquired, sited, and installed seven met towers and a SODAR unit at nine sites around Bangladesh, with each site providing “ground truth” measurements at several heights for anywhere from 12–43 months. The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) created a high-resolution gridded analysis over this 3.5-year period using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model at 3-km grid spacing and the Four-Dimensional Data Assimilation (FDDA) scheme. This WRF analysis, which was validated against the special met tower and SODAR observations, then forms the backbone of NREL’s Renewable Energy Data Explorer (RED-E) for Bangladesh, a publicly available, web-based toolkit that allows policy-makers, transmission planners, and developers to overlay wind resource layers at several heights with multiple layers of other project siting data, including transmission lines, land use type, and protected areas.

Based on wind installation cost assumptions in nearby countries, we estimate that southern Bangladesh in particular, where the average wind speed is higher, has the potential for economically viable utility-scale wind development at 120-m hub height with Class-III turbines. This presentation summarizes the key results and some of the unique challenges encountered by this project.