Short-Term Wind Power Forecasting Based on Clustering Pre-Calculated CFD Method

To meet the increasing wind power forecasting (WPF) demands of newly built wind farms without historical data, physical WPF methods are widely used. The computational fluid dynamics (CFD) pre-calculated flow fields (CPFF)-based WPF is a promising physical approach, which can balance well the competing demands of computational efficiency and accuracy. To enhance its adaptability for wind farms in complex terrain, a WPF method combining wind turbine clustering with CPFF is first proposed where the wind turbines in the wind farm are clustered and a forecasting is undertaken for each cluster. K-means, hierarchical agglomerative and spectral analysis methods are used to establish the wind turbine clustering models. The Silhouette Coefficient, Calinski-Harabaz index and within-between index are proposed as criteria to evaluate the effectiveness of the established clustering models. Based on different clustering methods and schemes, various clustering databases are built for clustering pre-calculated CFD (CPCC)-based short-term WPF. For the wind farm case studied, clustering evaluation criteria show that hierarchical agglomerative clustering has reasonable results, spectral clustering is better and K-means gives the best performance. The WPF results produced by different clustering databases also prove the effectiveness of the three evaluation criteria in turn. The newly developed CPCC model has a much higher WPF accuracy than the CPFF model without using clustering techniques, both on temporal and spatial scales. The research provides supports for both the development and improvement of short-term physical WPF systems.