Comparative Winds’ Statistical Distributions Study for the Central Southern Region of Brazil

The industrial and social development of a country requires large amounts of energy, particularly electricity. To follow the development with an efficient power grid, the human society has sought alternative energy sources that are economically and ecologically viable. The wind energy is one of such alternatives. However, the deployment of wind farms requires a previous study of the winds’ statistical profile in the region of interest. With this in mind, this work performs an analysis of three different statistical distributions to see which best fits the wind profile in the Central Region of the South of Brazil. The Weibull, Log Normal and Rayleigh statistical distribution were studied and compared with the values of wind speed collected at 50 meters from the SONDA site operating in São Martinho da Serra, RS in the Southern Space Observatory - OES/CRS/CCR/INPE–MCT. The analysis was performed between 2005 and 2009 showed that among the three distributions, the Weibull presents the best correlation and the smaller errors, MBE and RMSE.