Numerical Weather Prediction and Artificial Neural Network Coupling for Wind Energy Forecast

In the past two decades, wind energy has been under fast development worldwide. The dramatic increase of wind power penetration in electricity production has posed a big challenge to grid integration due to the high uncertainty of wind power. Accurate real-time forecasts of wind farm power outputs can help to mitigate the problem. Among the various techniques developed for wind power forecasting, the hybridization of numerical weather prediction (NWP) and machine learning (ML) techniques such as artificial neural networks (ANNs) are attracting many researchers world-wide nowadays, because it has the potential to yield more accurate forecasts. In this paper, two hybrid NWP and ANN models for wind power forecasting over a highly complex terrain are proposed. The developed models have a fine temporal resolution and a sufficiently large prediction horizon (>6 h ahead). Model 1 directly forecasts the energy production of each wind turbine. Model 2 forecasts first the wind speed, then converts it to the power using a fitted power curve. Effects of various modeling options (selection of inputs, network structures, etc.) on the model performance are investigated. Performances of different models are evaluated based on four normalized error measures. Statistical results of model predictions are presented with discussions. Python was utilized for task automation and machine learning. The end result is a fully working library for wind power predictions and a set of tools for running the models in forecast mode. It is shown that the proposed models are able to yield accurate wind farm power forecasts at a site with high terrain and flow complexities. Especially, for Model 2, the normalized Mean Absolute Error and Root Mean Squared Error are obtained as 8.76% and 13.03%, respectively, lower than the errors reported by other models in the same category.