Short-term forecasting of wind speed and related electrical power

Wind speed and the related electrical power of wind turbines are forecasted. The work is focused on the operation of power systems with integrated wind parks. Artificial neural networks models are proposed for forecasting average values of the following 10 min or 1 h. Input quantities for the prediction are wind speeds and their derivatives. Also, spatial correlation of wind speeds and its use for forecasting, are investigated. The methods are tested using data collected over seven years at six different sites on islands of the South and Central Aegean Sea in Greece.     

Estimation of wind speed profile using adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS)

Wind energy has become a major competitor of traditional fossil fuel energy, particularly with the successful operation of multi-megawatt sized wind turbines. However, wind with reasonable speed is not adequately sustainable everywhere to build an economical wind farm. The potential site has to be thoroughly investigated at least with respect to wind speed profile and air density. Wind speed increases with height, thus an increase of the height of turbine rotor leads to more generated power. Therefore, it is imperative to have a precise knowledge of wind speed profiles in order to assess the potential for a wind farm site. This paper proposes a clustering algorithm based neuro-fuzzy method to find wind speed profile up to height of 100 m based on knowledge of wind speed at heights 10, 20, 30, 40 m. The model estimated wind speed at 40 m based on measured data at 10, 20, and 30 m has 3% mean absolute percent error when compared with measured wind speed at height 40 m. This close agreement between estimated and measured wind speed at 40 m indicates the viability of the proposed method. The comparison with the 1/7th law and experimental wind shear method further proofs the suitability of the proposed method for generating wind speed profile based on knowledge of wind speed at lower heights.     

基于小波变换与Elman神经网络的短期风速组合预测

风速的准确预测对风电场发电系统的经济和安全运行有着重要的作用。为了克服风速随机性强的缺点,提高短期风速预测的精度,提出了一种将小波变换与Elman神经网络相结合的短期风速组合预测模型。该模型由小波预处理模块和神经网络预测模块组成。首先利用小波预处理模块将风速序列作多尺度分解,重构得到不同频段的子序列,然后利用Elman神经网络模块分别对其训练和预测。实际风速预测结果表明,与单一的Elman和ARMA法相比,该组合预测模型的预测精度有较大的改善,可以用于风电场短期风速的预测。     

ARMA based approaches for forecasting the tuple of wind speed and direction

Short-term forecasting of wind speed and direction is of great importance to wind turbine operation and efficient energy harvesting. In this study, the forecasting of wind speed and direction tuple is performed. Four approaches based on autoregressive moving average (ARMA) method are employed for this purpose. The first approach features the decomposition of the wind speed into lateral and longitudinal components. Each component is represented by an ARMA model, and the results are combined to obtain the wind direction and speed forecasts. The second approach employs two independent ARMA models – a traditional ARMA model for predicting wind speed and a linked ARMA model for wind direction. The third approach features vector autoregression (VAR) models to forecast the tuple of wind attributes. The fourth approach involves employing a restricted version of the VAR approach to predict the same. By employing these four approaches, the hourly mean wind attributes are forecasted 1-h ahead for two wind observation sites in North Dakota, USA. The results are compared using the mean absolute error (MAE) as a measure for forecasting quality. It is found that the component model is better at predicting the wind direction than the traditional-linked ARMA model, whereas the opposite is observed for wind speed forecasting. Utilizing VAR approaches rather than the univariate counterparts brings modest improvement in wind direction prediction but not in wind speed prediction. Between restricted and unrestricted versions of VAR models, there is little difference in terms of forecasting performance.     

测风数据间隔对风速预测精度影响的研究

风速预测对风电场控制和电网调度具有十分重要的意义。文章以不同时间间隔的测风数据为基础,采用时间序列法和人工神经网络法对风速进行预测,通过比较风速预测绝对平均误差,说明时间间隔较短时,采用BP神经网络预测精度较高;当时间间隔增大时,采用时间序列法预测精度较高;时间间隔过大,即风速数据太少时,两种预测方法误差都较大,须谨慎使用。该研究结果对风电机组控制系统的设计以及电网调度计划的制定具有参考价值。     

Wind speed forecasting for wind farms: A method based on support vector regression

In this paper, a hybrid methodology based on Support Vector Regression for wind speed forecasting is proposed. Using the autoregressive model called Time Delay Coordinates, feature selection is performed by the Phase Space Reconstruction procedure. Then, a Support Vector Regression model is trained using univariate wind speed time series. Parameters of Support Vector Regression are tuned by a genetic algorithm. The proposed method is compared against the persistence model, and autoregressive models (AR, ARMA, and ARIMA) tuned by Akaike's Information Criterion and Ordinary Least Squares method. The stationary transformation of time series is also evaluated for the proposed method. Using historical wind speed data from the Mexican Wind Energy Technology Center (CERTE) located at La Ventosa, Oaxaca, México, the accuracy of the proposed forecasting method is evaluated for a whole range of short termforecasting horizons (from 1 to 24 h ahead). Results show that, forecasts made with our method are more accurate for medium (5–23 h ahead) short term WSF and WPF than those made with persistence and autoregressive models.     

Assessment of the benefits of numerical weather predictions in wind power forecasting based on statistical methods

Several forecast systems based on Artificial Neural Networks have been developed to predict power production of a wind farm located in a complex terrain, where geographical effects make wind speed predictions difficult) in different time horizons: 1,3,6,12 and 24 h.In the first system, the neural network has been used only as a statistic model based on time series of wind power; later it has been integrated with numerical weather predictions, by which an interesting improvement of the performance has been reached, especially with the longer time horizons. In particular, a sensitivity analysis has been carried out in order to find those numerical weather parameters with the best impact on the forecast.Then, after the implementation of forecast systems based on a single ANN, the two best prediction systems individuated through the sensitivity analysis, have been employed in a hybrid approach, made up of three different ANNs.Besides, a prediction system based on the wavelet decomposition technique has been also carried out in order to evaluate its contribute on the forecast performance in two time horizons (1 and 24 h).The error of the different forecast systems is investigated and the statistical distributions of the error are calculated and presented.     

Wind speed forecasting based on the hybrid ensemble empirical mode decomposition and GA-BP neural network method

Wind speed is the major factor that affects the wind generation, and in turn the forecasting accuracy of wind speed is the key to wind power prediction. In this paper, a wind speed forecasting method based on improved empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and GA-BP neural network is proposed. EMD has been applied extensively for analyzing nonlinear stochastic signals. Ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) is an improved method of EMD, which can effectively handle the mode-mixing problem and decompose the original data into more stationary signals with different frequencies. Each signal is taken as an input data to the GA-BP neural network model. The final forecasted wind speed data is obtained by aggregating the predicted data of individual signals. Cases study of a wind farm in Inner Mongolia, China, shows that the proposed hybrid method is much more accurate than the traditional GA-BP forecasting approach and GA-BP with EMD and wavelet neural network method. By the sensitivity analysis of parameters, it can be seen that appropriate settings on parameters can improve the forecasting result. The simulation with MATLAB shows that the proposed method can improve the forecasting accuracy and computational efficiency, which make it suitable for on-line ultra-short term (10 min) and short term (1 h) wind speed forecasting.     

基于PSO优化LS-SVM的短期风速预测

提出了一种基于粒子群(PSO)算法优化最小二乘支持向量机(LS-SVM)的风电场风速预测方法。以相关性较高的历史风速序列作为输入,建立预测模型,并用粒子群算法优化模型参数。在对未来1 h风速进行预测时,文章所提出的模型比最小二乘支持向量机模型及BP神经网络模型具有较高的预测精度和运算速度。算例结果表明,经粒子群优化的最小二乘支持向量机算法是进行短期风速预测的有效方法。     

On comparing three artificial neural networks for wind speed forecasting

Wind speed forecasting is critical for wind energy conversion systems since it greatly influences the issues such as the scheduling of a power system, and the dynamic control of the wind turbine. In this paper, we present a comprehensive comparison study on the application of different artificial neural networks in 1-h-ahead wind speed forecasting. Three types of typical neural networks, namely, adaptive linear element, back propagation, and radial basis function, are investigated. The wind data used are the hourly mean wind speed collected at two observation sites in North Dakota. The performance is evaluated based on three metrics, namely, mean absolute error, root mean square error, and mean absolute percentage error. The results show that even for the same wind dataset, no single neural network model outperforms others universally in terms of all evaluation metrics. Moreover, the selection of the type of neural networks for best performance is also dependent upon the data sources. Among the optimal models obtained, the relative difference in terms of one particular evaluation metric can be as much as 20%. This indicates the need of generating a single robust and reliable forecast by applying a post-processing method.     

A comprehensive review and analysis of solar forecasting techniques

In the last two decades, renewable energy has been paid immeasurable attention to toward the attainment of electricity requirements for domestic, industrial, and agriculture sectors. Solar forecasting plays a vital role in smooth operation, scheduling, and balancing of electricity production by standalone PV plants as well as grid interconnected solar PV plants. Numerous models and techniques have been developed in short, mid and long-term solar forecasting. This paper analyzes some of the potential solar forecasting models based on various methodologies discussed in literature, by mainly focusing on investigating the influence of meteorological variables, time horizon, climatic zone, pre-processing techniques, air pollution, and sample size on the complexity and accuracy of the model. To make the paper reader-friendly, it presents all-important parameters and findings of the models revealed from different studies in a tabular mode having the year of publication, time resolution, input parameters, forecasted parameters, error metrics, and performance. The literature studied showed that ANN-based models outperform the others due to their nonlinear complex problem-solving capabilities. Their accuracy can be further improved by hybridization of the two models or by performing pre-processing on the input data. Besides, it also discusses the diverse key constituents that affect the accuracy of a model. It has been observed that the proper selection of training and testing period along with the correlated dependent variables also enhances the accuracy of the model.     

The application of artificial neural networks to mapping of wind speed profile for energy application in Nigeria

Modelling and prediction of wind speed are essential prerequisites in the sitting and sizing of wind power applications. The profile of wind speed in Nigeria is modelled using artificial neural network (ANN). The ANN model consists of 3-layered, feed-forward, back-propagation network with different configurations, designed using the Neural Toolbox for MATLAB. The monthly mean daily wind speed data monitored at 10 m above ground level for a period of 20 years (1983–2003) for 28 ground stations operated by the Nigeria Meteorological Services (NIMET) were used as training (18 stations) and testing (10 stations) dataset. The geographical parameters (latitude, longitude and altitude) and the month of the year were used as input data, while the monthly mean wind speed was used as the output of the network. The optimum network architecture with minimum Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) of 8.9% and correlation coefficient (r) between the predicted and the measured wind speed values of 0.9380 was obtained. The predicted monthly wind speed ranged from 0.9–13.1 m/s with an annual mean of 4.7 m/s. The model predicted wind speed values are given in the form of monthly maps, which can be easily used for assessment of wind energy potential for different locations within Nigeria.     

A comparison of various forecasting techniques applied to mean hourly wind speed time series

This paper presents a comparison of various forecasting approaches, using time series analysis, on mean hourly wind speed data. In addition to the traditional linear (ARMA) models and the commonly used feed forward and recurrent neural networks, other approaches are also examined including the Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference Systems (ANFIS) and Neural Logic Networks. The developed models are evaluated for their ability to produce accurate and fast forecasts.     

Short-term wind speed forecasting using wavelet transform and support vector machines optimized by genetic algorithm

Affected by various environment factors, wind speed presents characters of high fluctuations, autocorrelation and stochastic volatility; thereby it is hard to forecast with a single model. A hybrid model combining with input selected by deep quantitative analysis, Wavelet Transform (WT), Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Support Vector Machines (SVM) was proposed. WT was exploited to decompose the wind speed signal into two components, an approximation signal to maintain the major fluctuations and a detail signal to eliminate the stochastic volatility. SVM were built to model the approximation signal. Autocorrelation and partial correlation were applied to analyze the inner ARIMA Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) relationship between the historical speeds thus to select the input of SVM from them, and Granger causality test was applied to select input from environment variables by checking the influence of temperature with different leading lengths. The parameters in SVM were fine-tuned by GA to ensure the generalization of SVM. A case study of a wind farm from North China demonstrates that this method outperforms the comparison models.     

Support vector machines for short‐term electrical load forecasting

Short‐term electrical load forecasting plays a vital role in the electric power industries. It ensures the availability of supply of electricity, as well as providing the means of avoiding over‐ and under‐utilization of generating capacity and therefore optimizes energy prices. Several methods have been applied to short‐term load forecasting, including statistical, regression and neural networks methods. This paper introduces support vector machines, the latest neural network algorithm, to short‐term electrical load forecasting and compares its performance with the auto‐regression model. The results indicate that support vector machines compare favourably against the auto‐regressive model using the same data for building and testing both models based on the root‐mean‐square errors between the actual and the predicted data. Support vector machines allow the training data set to be increased beyond what is possible using the auto‐regressive model or other neural networks methods. Increasing the training data further improves the performance of support vector machines method. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Analysis of wind power generation and prediction using ANN: A case study

Many developing nations, such as India have embarked upon wind energy programs for areas experiencing high average wind speeds throughout the year. One of the states in India that is actively pursuing wind power generation programs is Tamil Nadu. Within this state, Muppandal area is one of the identified regions where wind farm concentration is high. Wind energy engineers are interested in studies that aim at assessing the output of wind farms, for which, artificial intelligence techniques can be usefully adapted. The present paper attempts to apply this concept for assessment of the wind energy output of wind farms in Muppandal, Tamil Nadu (India). Field data are collected from seven wind farms at this site over a period of 3 years from April 2002 to March 2005 and used for the analysis and prediction of power generation from wind farms. The model has been developed with the help of neural network methodology. It involves three input variables—wind speed, relative humidity and generation hours and one output variable-energy output of wind farms. The modeling is done using MATLAB toolbox. The model accuracy is evaluated by comparing the simulated results with the actual measured values at the wind farms and is found to be in good agreement.     

Electric load forecasting by using dynamic neural network

Electrical energy is fundamental for the wellbeing and for the economic development of any country. However, all countries must ensure access to essential resources and ensure the continuity of its supply. Due to the non-storable nature of electrical energy, the amount of consumed active power should always be equal the produced active power just to avoid power system frequency deviation problem. In order to keep the relationship production–consumption relation in compliance with different standards and to secure profitable operations of power system, electric load consumption must be predicted and controlled instantaneously. Several statistical and classical techniques are proposed in the literature but unfortunately all these methods are not accurate in a satisfactory manner. In this paper, a dynamic neural network is used for the prediction of daily power consumption. The suitability and the performance of the proposed approach is illustrated and verified with simulations on load data collected from French Transmission System Operator (RTE) website. The obtained results show that the accuracy and the efficiency are improved comparatively to conventional methods widely used in this field of research.     

A novel online training neural network-based algorithm for wind speed estimation and adaptive control of PMSG wind turbine system for maximum power extraction

In this paper, an adaptive control scheme for maximum power point tracking of stand-alone PMSG wind turbine systems (WTS) is presented. A novel procedure to estimate the wind speed is derived. To achieve this, a neural network identifier (NNI) is designed in order to approximate the mechanical torque of the WTS. With this information, the wind speed is calculated based on the optimal mechanical torque point. The NNI approximates in real-time the mechanical torque signal and it does not need off-line training to get its optimal parameter values. In this way, it can really approximates any mechanical torque value with good accuracy. In order to regulate the rotor speed to the optimal speed value, a block-backstepping controller is derived. Uniform asymptotic stability of the tracking error origin is proved using Lyapunov arguments. Numerical simulations and comparisons with a standard passivity based controller are made in order to show the good performance of the proposed adaptive scheme.     

A classification mechanism for determining average wind speed and power in several regions of Turkey using artificial neural networks

In this paper, average wind speed and wind power values are estimated using artificial neural networks (ANNs) in seven regions of Turkey. To start with, a network has been set up, and trained with the data set obtained from several stations—each station gather data from five different heights—from each region, one randomly selected height value of a station has been used as test data. Wind data readings corresponding to the last 50 years of relevant regions were obtained from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (TSMS). The software has been developed under Matlab 6.0. In the input layer, longitude, latitude, altitude, and height are used, while wind speeds and related power values correspond to output layer. Then we have used the networks to make predictions for varying heights, which are not incorporated to the system at the training stage. The network has successfully predicted the required output values for the test data and the mean error levels for regions differed between 3% and 6%. We believe that using ANNs average wind speed and wind power of a region can be predicted provided with lesser amount of sampling data, that the sampling mechanism is reliable and adequate.