MULTI-CRITERIA EVALUATION OF THE APPROPRIATE OFFSHORE WIND FARM LOCATION IN NIGERIA

Abstract

Energy sustainability requires meeting our energy needs upon which economic development depends. The need to improve on the present power generating capacity of Nigeria, has brought about energy diversification by increasing the present energy sources to include renewable resources and this has led to the idea of this work. This work is aimed at determining the appropriate offshore wind farm location(s) in Nigeria to address the issue of wind energy availability and utilization in the country. Attributes for offshore wind farm location were collected for three Alternatives in Nigeria which are Victoria Island in Lagos, Koko offshore region of Warri and Abbonema of Port-Hacourt. Wind speeds data were collected from the Nigeria Metrological (NIMET) stations in the states under consideration while other required attributes were collected with the use of a Questionnaire which was responded to by professionals. Collected data were analyzed using fuzzy TOPSIS Multi-Criteria analysis tool. Average of a ten years wind speed for Lagos, Warri and Port-Harcourt were 6.251m/s, 7.294m/s and 7.347m/s respectively. Analytic Hierarchy Process gave a Consistency Index of 0.1230 and Consistency Ratio of 0.0843. The consistency ratio from the AHP was used to calculate the required Criteria Weight (Cw) for the fuzzy TOPSIS analysis. The results from the TOPSIS analysis showed that Lagos showed a greater advantage over the two other alternatives been considered. Finally, from the cummulative value of the analyzed attributes, Victoria Island (Lagos) has the highest figure of 233.6677 with a consideration rate of 38% and this places it above Koko (Warri) and Abonnema (Port-Harcourt) with a value of 187.7704 (30%) and 195.4378 (32%).