Tendências e ciclos médios da velocidade do vento e complementaridade energética em regiões próximas a empreendimentos eólicos no Nordeste do Brasil

Abstract

Brazil, as a member of the Paris Agreement, assumed the responsibility “to strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change and strengthen its capacity to deal with the impacts resulting from these changes”. Therefore, the role of replacing or reducing polluting energy sources by the production of renewable energies, such as wind and solar, must be considered in order to meet these objectives, with a focus on the Northeast region of the country, which stands out in both resources (wind and global radiation). As a result, studies on energy complementarity are also important, which aim at diversifying the local energy matrix and maximizing the use of sources. In this context, the present research aimed to carry out a spatial and temporal analysis of the onshore wind resource in Northeast Brazil (NEB) and verify a possible complementarity with the solar resource in areas close to wind farms that are currently installed in the region. For this, wind speed and global solar radiation data were used. These data come from the network of automatic weather stations managed by the National Institute of Meteorology (INMET). They cover the period from January 1, 2009 to December 31, 2018. The temporal sampling of data was one hour and 27 locations were selected in the NEB, which are located close to wind farms. Initially, the data were submitted to the multiple imputation method to fill in the missing data. After that, cluster analysis was applied to group these locations according to their wind speed values in: coast or interior, characterizing their average and hourly cycles. The trends of increase or decrease in wind speed in this region were also estimated from the Mann-Kendall linear trend test, on the hourly scale. Finally, for the complementarity analysis, Spearman correlations were calculated between the wind and solar power between the different stations.