A hierarchical approach to probabilistic wind power forecasting

Gilbert, Ciaran and Browell, Jethro and McMillan, David; (2018) A hierarchical approach to probabilistic wind power forecasting. In: 2018 IEEE International Conference on Probabilistic Methods Applied to Power Systems (PMAPS). IEEE, USA. ISBN 9781538635964 (https://doi.org/10.1109/PMAPS.2018.8440571)

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Abstract

This paper describes a method to generate improved probabilistic wind farm power forecasts in a hierarchical framework with the incorporation of production data from individual wind turbines. Wind power forms a natural hierarchy as generated electricity is aggregated from the individual turbine, to farm, to the regional level and so on. To forecast the wind farm power generation, a layered approach is proposed whereby deterministic forecasts from the lower layer (turbine level) are used as input features to an upper-level (wind farm) probabilistic model. In a case study at a utility scale wind farm it is shown that improvements in probabilistic forecast skill (CRPS) of 1.24% and 2.39% are obtainable when compared to two very competitive benchmarks based on direct forecasting of the wind farm power using Gradient Boosting Trees and an Analog Ensemble, respectively.