Abstract
Urban wind energy has become a popular source of sustainable power in modern urban configurations. This study aims to analyze the technical and economic aspects of installing wind-harnessing devices near different common urban configurations. Computational fluid dynamics simulations utilized by Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes equations and realizable k-ϵ turbulence model are used to model the turbulent urban canopy layer in the vicinity of four different urban settings namely an isolated high-rise building model, and 3 clusters of buildings with different central building heights, ranging from no building to a high-rise building model. Normalized wind power density (PD) and turbulence intensity (TI) contours were plotted to identify areas of interest to install urban wind turbines. To show the significance of this research, the levelized cost of energy was calculated for an urban horizontal axis wind turbine installed at locations with the highest wind PD and lowest TI values. The results indicated that while the highest wind PD locations and their values change with the selected configuration, promising regions can be identified for wind harnessing applications.
