A Performance Comparison of Machine Learning Methods For Short-Range Wind Power Estimation

Abstract

Renewable energy generation is increasingly employed nowadays for multitudes of reasons such as global warming, depletion of conventional sources of energy and emission constraints. Even though the wind generators constitute a potential source of energy, the uncertainties associated with them make the operation complex. As a consequence, the successful operation and planning of the present distributed generation dominated power systems requires exact estimate of wind power. Numerous wind power estimation techniques based on Machine Learning were available. This work attempts to compare the wind power estimation efficiency of a few machine learning approaches. At first, the performance of a Feed Forward Neural Network with different activation functions is considered. Next, Support Vector Regression Machine with different kernels is utilized for estimating the wind power. Then, deep Learning networks such as Long Short-Term Memory network, Convolutional Neural Network and Recurrent Neural Network are employed for assessing the future wind power and their ability is analyzed. Finally, a comparative chart is prepared to evaluate the efficacy and usefulness of the different machine learning techniques employed for estimating wind power.