Short Term Wind Power Prediction Based on Improved Kriging Interpolation, Empirical Mode Decomposition, and Closed-Loop Forecasting Engine

The growing trend of wind generation in power systems and its uncertain nature have recently highlighted the importance of wind power prediction. In this paper a new wind power prediction approach is proposed which includes an improved version of Kriging Interpolation Method (KIM), Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD), an information-theoretic feature selection method, and a closed-loop forecasting engine. In the proposed approach, EMD decomposes volatile wind power time series into more smooth and well-behaved components. To enhance the performance of EMD, Improved KIM (IKIM) is used instead of Cubic Spline (CS) fitting in it. The proposed IKIM includes the von Karman covariance model whose settings are optimized based on error variance minimization using an evolutionary algorithm. Each component obtained by this EMD decomposition is separately predicted by a closed-loop neural network-based forecasting engine whose inputs are determined by an information-theoretic feature selection method. Wind power prediction results are obtained by combining all individual forecasts of these components. The proposed wind power forecast approach is tested on the real-world wind farms in Spain and Alberta, Canada. The results obtained from the proposed approach are extensively compared with the results of many other wind power prediction methods.