Global opportunities for airborne wind

Master thesis (2014)

Authors

Contributors

R.W. Kunneke (mentor)
Department
Economics of Technology and Innovation (TPM) (TU Delft)
Copyright: © 2014 Wijnja, J.
Decision making Wind energy Renewables Windenergy AHP Airborne wind Conjunctive screening PROMETHEE Multi criteria decision making
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Published Date

09-12-2014

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Faculty

Technology, Policy and Management

Department

Economics of Technology and Innovation

Abstract

It is the objective of this graduation research to determine the nations with the highest deployment opportunity for airborne wind energy (AWE) generation systems. Compared to conventional, ground based, wind energy systems, the flying structure of the airborne wind turbine substitutes the rotor blades and a tether substitutes the tower. These systems have the potential to harvest electricity against much lower cost, will soon become commercially available, and could take a significant share of the growing wind energy market. A unique top down approach is applied by analyzing all 193 United Nations member states with a combination of the conjunctive screening method with PROMETHEE-AHP multi criteria decision making. First, a set of conjunctive screening rules will determine if the basic conditions for wind energy are present. Nations which satisfy these rules are subject to a detailed multi criteria analysis. The unique set of relevant criteria in this analysis are determined from a combination of the renewable energy planning, and international business literature in combination with the view of airborne wind energy experts. The relative importance of these criteria is determined with an expert survey, based on the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), at which 26 experts participated from various background. A novel extension to the classical AHP weight factor calculation methodology is proposed, verified and applied to verify the breakdown of criteria into sub criteria. The results of this study are compared with the current activity in airborne and conventional wind energy. This study was able to select the nations with (airborne) wind energy activity. However this study also showed that many nations with high opportunities in airborne wind have no current activity in this field. Additionally it was found that nations, which are characterized by the highest installed capacity do not necessarily have a highest opportunity for airborne wind and vice versa. Hence many airborne wind resources in nations with high opportunity for airborne wind are still untapped and offer a great potential for future energy harvesting. Due to many similarities of the technologies, the conventional wind energy industry can also benefit from the results of this study.