IMPACTS OF WIND TURBINES ON LAND SURFACE TEMPERATURE OF ADAMA CITY

Abstract

In recent years, wind turbines have become an acceptable alternative for electrical energy generation to fossil fuels or nuclear power plants, because of its environmental and economic benefits. The rotation of Wind turbines with different wind speed may have the cooling or warming effect on land surface air temperature at different times of the day. This Thesis deals with impact of wind turbines on land surface air temperature of Adama city. In order to investigate the effect of wind turbines on surface temperature of Adama city, three different sites were selected purposively as well as using simple random sampling method according to their distances from Adama I wind Farm for experimental test. The data were taken simultaneously from early morning to evening with an interval of three hours at all sites. MATLAB2013a and Stata13 version software were used to plot of the parameters and to analyze the significance of the variation between the Front and Back LST from each site, respectively. From the result of variation between Front and Back LST of the three sites, there is an impact of the rotation of the turbines on land surface air temperature of site A and site B, when there is enough wind speed to rotate the turbines at 12:00, 15:00, and 18:00 hours. Wind speed is low during early morning and at 09:00, so that there were not significant differences between the front and back temperatures at the three sites. Site C is located far away from the wind turbines hence, the gap between Front and Back land surface air temperature were not significant from early morning to evening hours. Since this study focused on day time effects, similar study is required for night time to get a more conclusive result.