Ocean wave power forecasting using convolutional neural networks

Abstract

Climate change “fuelled” by anthropogenic causes has been identified as the greatest threat faced by societies. In this respect, the roadmap to a “greener” generation mix certainly includes a greater heterogeneity in terms of renewable energy sources. In this regard, one of the leading candidates is ocean wave energy. One of the issues with renewables in general is their unpredictably and variability, as it is crucial to address the subject of wave power forecasting, to facilitate a future market integration. Hence, to tackle this prediction problem, a new approach to short-term wave power forecasting is proposed, based on deep learning capabilities. These highly popular networks were traditionally developed to deal with images (2D data), so the authors discuss all the necessary implementation and design details to employ these networks with 1D input data, to solve a regression-based problem. These case-studies include wave data from three different locations. The proposed approach was tested across all seasons of the year, revealing the suitability to extract the relevant input data dependencies from the time-series. As such, especially for horizons up to 6 h, the proposed approach outperforms other conventional methods.