On the most suitable sites for wind farm development in Nigeria

The increasing demand for energy and the need for clean and affordable energy in Nigeria have necessitated the need for renewable energy resource assessment and subsequent determination of suitable sites within the country. One of the promising renewable energy resources with good potentials of meeting the energy requirements is wind. One of the main challenges of wind power development in Nigeria is lack of scientific data for policy formulation and decision making that will aid the development of wind power utilization. The data presented in this article were obtained with proper evaluation of the wind resource while taking into consideration environmental, social, and economic factors. The information from the data could be useful for taking optimal site selection decision by the policy makers, government, engineers etc. This will ensure optimal investment and return on investment for wind farm developers.


a b s t r a c t
The increasing demand for energy and the need for clean and affordable energy in Nigeria have necessitated the need for renewable energy resource assessment and subsequent determination of suitable sites within the country. One of the promising renewable energy resources with good potentials of meeting the energy requirements is wind. One of the main challenges of wind power development in Nigeria is lack of scientific data for policy formulation and decision making that will aid the development of wind power utilization. The data presented in this article were obtained with proper evaluation of the wind resource while taking into consideration environmental, social, and economic factors. The information from the data could be useful for taking optimal site selection decision by the policy makers, government, engineers etc. This will ensure optimal investment and return on investment for wind farm developers.
& The data set could serve as a tool for estimating wind energy potential in the country and development of renewable energy map.
The data set could serve as a reference for the utilization of wind resource for energy generation by investors and energy companies.
The data and findings could serve as a reference for government policies and planning. The data set could be used for educational and instructional purposes.

Data
The data contained in this paper comprises of proposed wind farm sites data obtained from wind farm site evaluation in Nigeria. The data includes wind farm suitability map for Nigeria ( Fig. 1), maps of the most suitable sites for wind farm development in the northern and southern part of Nigeria (Figs. 2 and 3), the total land area in Nigeria suitable for various wind power application (Fig. 4), and the total land area of the various suitability class in the most suitable states (Table 1).

Experimental design, materials and methods
The average annual wind speed data for 28 locations obtained from Nigeria Meteorological Agency (NIMET), Oshodi, Lagos, Nigeria was gotten from a previous work [1]. The data were interpolated to obtain wind speed value for other locations. The resulting map is shown in Fig. 5. The sources of other environmental and topological map data used are shown in Table 2. All evaluation data used are shown in Fig. 6(a-j) and were preprocessed using GIS software to make them usable in the wind farm site selection model. The experts' criteria pairwise comparison (linguistic) judgments obtained from experts within and outside Nigeria are shown in Table 3. The weights of the criteria were generated using the interval type-2 fuzzy AHP (MCDM) mathematical model [2] implemented in python. The mathematical model is shown in Fig. 7.    The criteria weights generated (Table 4), together with the preprocessed data, were inputted into the GIS-based model [3] to generate the wind farm site criteria map and exclusion map. The GISbased model, shown in Fig. 7, is a multi-criteria model that utilizes the interval type-2 fuzzy AHP technique and it was implemented using the ArcGIS Desktop software. The weighted linear combination technique [4] was used to obtain the wind farm site criteria map by aggregating individual criteria maps. While the GIS-based model is shown in Fig. 8., the wind farm site criteria map and exclusion map are shown in Fig. 9(a & b). The classify tool in the Arc Toolbox of the ArcGIS Desktop software was used to classify the suitability map. To obtain the suitability map, the site criteria maps were overlaid with the exclusion map to exclude the exclusion areas from the wind farm site evaluation using the overlay tool [5]. To finally extract the most suitable sites from the suitability map, the extract by mask tool was used. Microsoft Excel was used to generate the pie chart for the total land areas of the suitability classes. The criteria used in defining the suitability maps presented in Figs. 1-3 are shown in Table 5.