A Decision Support System for Wind Power Production

Abstract

Renewable energy production is constantly growing worldwide, and some countries produce a relevant percentage of their daily electricity consumption through wind energy. Therefore, decision support systems that can make accurate predictions of wind-based power production are of paramount importance for the traders operating in the energy market and for the managers in charge of planning the nonrenewable energy production. In this paper, we present a decision support system that can predict electric power production, estimate a variability index for the prediction, and analyze the wind farm (WF) production characteristics. The main contribution of this paper is a novel system for long-term electric power prediction based solely on the weather forecasts; thus, it is suitable for the WFs that cannot collect or manage the real-time data acquired by the sensors. Our system is based on neural networks and on novel techniques for calibrating and thresholding the weather forecasts based on the distinctive characteristics of the WF orography. We tuned and evaluated the proposed system using the data collected from two WFs over a two-year period and achieved satisfactory results. We studied different feature sets, training strategies, and system configurations before implementing this system for a player in the energy market. This company evaluated the power production prediction performance and the impact of our system at ten different WFs under real-world conditions and achieved a significant improvement with respect to their previous approach.