Abstract
The development of wind energy conversion systems becomes one of the most important aims of many developing countries such as Tunisia. This is due to the reduction in wind turbine costs, and fossil fuel atmospheric pollution. The evaluation of wind power potential is necessary to estimate wind resource and therefore conduct the suitable decisions for the wind power generation projects, technical and economical feasibility. The presented work in this paper was to investigate the potential of wind resource in the Gulf of Tunis in Tunisia. The hourly mean wind speed and wind direction with a 10-min time step provided by the NRG (National Resources Group) weather station were used to analyze the wind speed characteristics and the wind power potential. Weibull parameters are estimated based on the most frequently used methods in which their accuracy was compared based on different goodness of fit tests. Those wind characteristics are required to give the picture of wind potential distribution in the Gulf of Tunis. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.