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