Abstract
Promising onshore wind farm sites in Gangwon province of Korea were investigated in this study. Gangwon province was divided into twenty five simulation regions and a commercial program based on Reynolds averaged Navier-Stokes equation was used to find out wind resource maps of the regions. The national wind atlas with a period 2007-2009 developed by Korea institute of energy research was used as climatologies. The wind resource maps were combined to construct a wind resource map of Gangwon province with a horizontal spatial resolution of 100m. In addition to the wind resource, national environmental zoning map, distance from substation, residence and automobile road, Beakdudaegan mountain range, terrain slope, airport and military reservation district were considered to find out promising wind farm sites. A commercial wind farm design program was used to find out developable wind farm capacities in promising wind farm site with and without excluding environmental protection regions. The total wind farm capacities with and without excluding the protection regions were estimated to be 46MW and 598MW, respectively, when a 2MW commercial wind turbine was employed.