Assessment of Wind Turbine Integration for Microgrids at Naval Installations

This study evaluates the technical and economic viability of integrating wind turbines into naval microgrids at six geographically diverse bases. Eight turbine models from 7 kW to 2MWare analyzed using hub height wind speed distributions from NASA MERRA-2 and manufacturer power curves. Annual capacity factors are computed and used to derive turbine equivalent counts, integer procurement counts, and capital costs required to sustain a 1 MW average load. Results show pronounced site effects. High resource locations such as Souda Bay and Guam achieve capacity factor values around 0.5 for mid and utility scale machines, whereas low resource sites such as San Diego seldom exceed 0.2. Where siting allows, utility-scale machines minimize unit counts and often total cost. In some contexts, mid-scale designs yield the lowest procurement cost because integer counts remain modest. Small wind requires hundreds to thousands of units at weak sites, which drives prohibitive first costs and added balance of system complexity, and it is generally noncompetitive except under severe height or airspace constraints. The modeling framework links hub height wind distributions to performance data and explicitly accounts for integer procurement effects, and the method is transferable for preliminary wind integration decisions in naval and civilian microgrids. Estimates reflect simplified power curve representations and exclude balance of system and O&M costs.