Forecasting aggregated wind power production of multiple wind farms using hybrid wavelet-PSO-NNs

This paper describes the problem of short-term wind power production forecasting based on meteorological information. Aggregated wind power forecasts are produced for multiple wind farms using a hybrid intelligent algorithm that uses a data filtering technique based on wavelet transform (WT) and a soft computing model (SCM) based on neural network (NN), which is optimized by using particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed hybrid intelligent WT + NNPSO model, which takes into account the interactions of wind power, wind speed, wind direction, and temperature in the forecast process, the real data of wind farms located in the southern Alberta, Canada, are used to train and test the proposed model. The test results produced by the proposed hybrid WT + NNPSO model are compared with other SCMs as well as the benchmark persistence method. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed technique is capable of performing effectively with the variability and intermittency of wind power generation series in order to produce accurate wind power forecasts. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.