As wind has become one of the fastest growing renewable energy sources, the key issue of wind energy conversion systems is how to efficiently operate the wind turbines in a wide range of wind speeds. The wind speed has a huge impact on the dynamic response of wind turbine. For this purpose, many control algorithms are in need for a method to measure wind speed to increase performance. Unfortunately, no accurate measurement of the effective wind speed is online available from direct measurements, which means that it must be estimated in order to make such control methods applicable in practice. In this paper, a new method based on Kalman filter and artificial neural network is presented for the estimation of the effective wind speed. To verify the performance of the proposed scheme, some simulation studies are carried out.