Wind Power Forecasting - General Methodology

General Methodology

Several methods are used for short-term prediction of wind generation. The simplest ones are based on climatology or averages of past production values. They may be considered as reference forecasting methods since they are easy to implement, as well as benchmark when evaluating more advanced approaches. The most popular of these reference methods is certainly persistence. This naive predictor — commonly referred to as ‘what you see is what you get’ — states that the future wind generation will be the same as the last measured value. Despite its apparent simplicity, this naive method might be hard to beat for look-ahead times up to 4–6 hours ahead

Advanced approaches for short-term wind power forecasting necessitate predictions of meteorological variables as input. Then, they differ in the way predictions of meteorological variables are converted to predictions of wind power production, through the so-called power curve. Such advanced methods are traditionally divided into two groups. The first group, referred to as physical approach, focuses on the description of the wind flow around and inside the wind farm, and use the manufacturer's power curve, for proposing an estimation of the wind power output. In parallel the second group, referred to as statistical approach, concentrates on capturing the relation between meteorological predictions (and possibly historical measurements) and power output through statistical models whose parameters have to be estimated from data, without making any assumption on the physical phenomena.