ABSTRACT
The quest to reduce environmental impacts of conventional energy resources and, more importantly, to meet the growing energy demand of the global population had motivated considerable research attention in a wide range of environmental and engineering application of renewable form of energy. It is recognized that wind energy, as a renewable energy source, has stood out as the most valuable and promising choice. Wind energy by nature is clean, abundant, affordable, inexhaustible and environmentally preferable. Due to its many advantages, wind energy has also become the fastest growing renewable source of energy in both developed and developing countries. For example, wind energy is widely used to produce electricity in countries like Denmark, Spain, Germany, USA, China and India. Interestingly, the global cumulative installed capacity of wind power had
increased sharply from 6,100 MW in 1996 to about 237,669 MW in 2011 [1]. In Africa, for example, Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia are the leading countries with installed capacities of 550, 291 and 114 MW, respectively, at the end of 2011 [1].
