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International Journal of Engineering & Technology, 7 (4.37) (2018) 33-38 International Journal of Engineering & Technology Website: Www.Sciencepubco.Com/Index.Php/IJET Research Paper Investigation of Wind Energy to Generate Electric Power and its Role to Reduce Environmental Pollution in Iraq Shadan Kareem Ameen 1* , Murad Saeed Sedeeq 2 , Ali Bolatturk 3 1 Department of Environmental and Pollution Engineering, Northern Technical University, Kirkuk, Iraq 2 Department of Refrigeration and Air-Conditioning Engineering, Northern Technical University, Kirkuk, Iraq 3 Department of Mechanical Engineering, Suleyman Demirel University, Isparta 32260, Turkey *Corresponding author E-mail: Ameenshadan@gmail.com Abstract Wind energy is one of the renewable energy that has been widely used round the world which is abundant, renewable, and generally available. The present paper established to study the possibility of generating electric power by wind turbines for three important cities in Iraq located in terms of altitude from sea level and climate, namely (Mosul in north, Baghdad in middle and Basra in the south of Iraq). The calculations depend on the hourly meteorology data’s like wind speed, wind di rection and air temperature taken from (Iraqi meteoro- logical organization and seismology) since 2005 to 2015. Noting that, the calculations had been done for three variable types of wind turbine found in global markets which differ in capacity, cut-in velocity, cut-off velocity, blade diameter and initial cost. The main aims for present paper can be divide in three stages. First, it studies the possibility of using wind turbines for the selected cities. Then, it esti- mates the amount of annual electric power generation (EPG) and it’s contribution to minimize the environmental pollution if the same power generated by gas turbine which regarded the diffuse method in Iraq. Finally, an economic analysis is also carried out for each tur- bine. Life cycle assessment software (SimaPro V 7.2) has been used to obtain the amount of emissions produced per kWh electricity power by gas power plant. (P1-P2) method has been used to estimate the economic data’s for the project. The results of the research will decide the most appropriate zone to do the projects and the best turbine to give maximum EPG and its ability to reduce emissions with giving financial gain and payback period as an economic value to encourage the investors to apply like this project. Keywords: Environmental pollution, electric power generation, financial gain, life cycle assessment, payback period, wind turbine, wind speed. 1. Introduction The increasing demand for energy due to population growth and urbanization are led to an unexpected rise in fuel prices over the past decade. This does not affect to the fuel prices alone, but leads to increase air pollution and climate change also and it becomes one of the reasons that threaten the world. As expected future, energy consumption round the world will increase approximately by 56% in 2040s and most of these demands will met by fossil fuel (Gopalakrishnan et al., 2014). So, it was necessary to find alternative energy sources to reduce or eliminate the excessive greenhouse gas emissions. Therefore, many countries have en- couraged the use of clean energy, like renewable energies (Bakos, 2000). Wind energy is one of the renewable energy that has been widely used round the world which is abundant, renewable, and generally available. It has been used before 4000 years ago to power sail boats, grain pump water for farms and recently gener- ate electric power. The development of wind turbines happened as a result of the energy crises in the 1970s (Cengel and Boles, 2015). There are several classifications for wind turbine, but mainly it can be classified into two types depending on the axis of rotation namely horizontal axis and vertical axis wind turbines. The hori- zontal axis with propeller blades is the most common one which works more efficiently from other type (Saad and Asmuin, 2014). Iraq is one of the countries that intend to use wind turbine to elim- inate its environmental pollution. Because of the availability of natural gas in this country, most of the power plants operate by gases. Gas turbines have lots of emissions of green- house gases from the chimney, the largest proportion of the gases emitted from these turbines are CO2 which is responsible for the problem of global warming and H2S which is considered a haz- ardous gas to human health (Ariyaratnam et al., 2013).Generally, the climate of Iraq is described as hot and dry in summer and cool and rainy in the winter season. The annual average variation in wind speed and air temperature are between (2-8 m/s) and (10-45 o C) respectively (Rasham, 2017). There are numerous studies about this feild. In Spain (Torres et al., 2005) used a model of autoregressive moving average process to forecast hourly wind speed and its relationship to topographic of earth surface and tilt- ing to the persistence and its impact on the wind power. (Sedaghat et al., 2017) conducted a determination about wind speed for max- imum annual energy production (AEP) of different speed wind turbines in Iran based on the relationship between AEP and the produced capacity value. They concluded that the suitable value for rated wind speed is higher than the natural value. (Qin et al., 2017) examined the offshore wind energy storage for the cost of rated power saving, based on investigation of compressed air en- ergy stage (CAES) and hydraulic power transmission (HPT) sys- tem. They concluded that CAES+HPT can lead substantial saving about 21.6% for 20 years life time. (Akour et al., 2018) conducted a theoretical and practical study on the possibility of using micro wind turbine for the regions that have low wind speed. The study was based on design and implement new wind for two locations in UAE. The results showed that the new design is more cost effec- tive and more wind energy is harnessed by using the swept area