Predicting the energy output of wind farms based on weather data: important variables and their correlation

Pre-print available at: http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.1922Wind energy plays an increasing role in the supply of energy world wide. The energy output of a wind farm is highly dependent on the weather conditions present at its site. If the output can be predicted more accurately, energy suppliers can coordinate the collaborative production of different energy sources more efficiently to avoid costly overproduction. In this paper, we take a computer science perspective on energy prediction based on weather data and analyze the important parameters as well as their correlation on the energy output. To deal with the interaction of the different parameters, we use symbolic regression based on the genetic programming tool DataModeler. Our studies are carried out on publicly available weather and energy data for a wind farm in Australia. We report on the correlation of the different variables for the energy output. The model obtained for energy prediction gives a very reliable prediction of the energy output for newly supplied weather data. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd.Ekaterina Vladislavleva, Tobias Friedrich, Frank Neumann, Markus Wagne

Approaches for multi-step density forecasts with application to aggregated wind power

The generation of multi-step density forecasts for non-Gaussian data mostly relies on Monte Carlo simulations which are computationally intensive. Using aggregated wind power in Ireland, we study two approaches of multi-step density forecasts which can be obtained from simple iterations so that intensive computations are avoided. In the first approach, we apply a logistic transformation to normalize the data approximately and describe the transformed data using ARIMA--GARCH models so that multi-step forecasts can be iterated easily. In the second approach, we describe the forecast densities by truncated normal distributions which are governed by two parameters, namely, the conditional mean and conditional variance. We apply exponential smoothing methods to forecast the two parameters simultaneously. Since the underlying model of exponential smoothing is Gaussian, we are able to obtain multi-step forecasts of the parameters by simple iterations and thus generate forecast densities as truncated normal distributions. We generate forecasts for wind power from 15 minutes to 24 hours ahead. Results show that the first approach generates superior forecasts and slightly outperforms the second approach under various proper scores. Nevertheless, the second approach is computationally more efficient and gives more robust results under different lengths of training data. It also provides an attractive alternative approach since one is allowed to choose a particular parametric density for the forecasts, and is valuable when there are no obvious transformations to normalize the data.Comment: Corrected version includes updated equation (18). Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/09-AOAS320 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Comparison of nonhomogeneous regression models for probabilistic wind speed forecasting

In weather forecasting, nonhomogeneous regression is used to statistically postprocess forecast ensembles in order to obtain calibrated predictive distributions. For wind speed forecasts, the regression model is given by a truncated normal distribution where location and spread are derived from the ensemble. This paper proposes two alternative approaches which utilize the generalized extreme value (GEV) distribution. A direct alternative to the truncated normal regression is to apply a predictive distribution from the GEV family, while a regime switching approach based on the median of the forecast ensemble incorporates both distributions. In a case study on daily maximum wind speed over Germany with the forecast ensemble from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, all three approaches provide calibrated and sharp predictive distributions with the regime switching approach showing the highest skill in the upper tail

Feature-driven improvement of renewable energy forecasting and trading

M. A. Muñoz, J. M. Morales, and S. Pineda, Feature-driven Improvement of Renewable Energy Forecasting and Trading, IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, 2020.Inspired from recent insights into the common ground of machine learning, optimization and decision-making, this paper proposes an easy-to-implement, but effective procedure to enhance both the quality of renewable energy forecasts and the competitive edge of renewable energy producers in electricity markets with a dual-price settlement of imbalances. The quality and economic gains brought by the proposed procedure essentially stem from the utilization of valuable predictors (also known as features) in a data-driven newsvendor model that renders a computationally inexpensive linear program. We illustrate the proposed procedure and numerically assess its benefits on a realistic case study that considers the aggregate wind power production in the Danish DK1 bidding zone as the variable to be predicted and traded. Within this context, our procedure leverages, among others, spatial information in the form of wind power forecasts issued by transmission system operators (TSO) in surrounding bidding zones and publicly available in online platforms. We show that our method is able to improve the quality of the wind power forecast issued by the Danish TSO by several percentage points (when measured in terms of the mean absolute or the root mean square error) and to significantly reduce the balancing costs incurred by the wind power producer.European Research Council (ERC) under the EU Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 755705) Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry, and Competitiveness through project ENE2017-83775-P

Benefits of spatio-temporal modelling for short term wind power forecasting at both individual and aggregated levels

The share of wind energy in total installed power capacity has grown rapidly in recent years around the world. Producing accurate and reliable forecasts of wind power production, together with a quantification of the uncertainty, is essential to optimally integrate wind energy into power systems. We build spatio-temporal models for wind power generation and obtain full probabilistic forecasts from 15 minutes to 5 hours ahead. Detailed analysis of the forecast performances on the individual wind farms and aggregated wind power are provided. We show that it is possible to improve the results of forecasting aggregated wind power by utilizing spatio-temporal correlations among individual wind farms. Furthermore, spatio-temporal models have the advantage of being able to produce spatially out-of-sample forecasts. We evaluate the predictions on a data set from wind farms in western Denmark and compare the spatio-temporal model with an autoregressive model containing a common autoregressive parameter for all wind farms, identifying the specific cases when it is important to have a spatio-temporal model instead of a temporal one. This case study demonstrates that it is possible to obtain fast and accurate forecasts of wind power generation at wind farms where data is available, but also at a larger portfolio including wind farms at new locations. The results and the methodologies are relevant for wind power forecasts across the globe as well as for spatial-temporal modelling in general