Direct and indirect short-term aggregated turbine- and farm-level wind power forecasts integrating several NWP sources

Abstract

The wind power sector is experiencing rapid growth, which creates new challenges for its electricity grid integration. Accurate wind power forecasting (WPF) is crucial for trading, balancing, and dispatching wind energy. In this paper, we examine the use of aggregated turbine- and farmlevel WPFs in the Nordic energy market. The turbine-level WPFs were retrieved from a previous study, while the farm-level WPFs were developed using the same methodology, incorporating inputs from three different numerical weather predictions (NWPs) and implementing both direct and indirect forecasting approaches. In the indirect WPF approach, we explore the impact of using wind direction as an input for the wind farm-level power performance model. The different WPFs are combined into one using weights related to up-to-date forecast errors. An automated and optimized machine-learning pipeline using data from a Norwegian wind farm is used to implement the proposed forecasting methods. The indirect approach, that uses the wind-downscaling model, improves the wind speed forecast accuracy compared to raw forecasts from the relevant NWPs. Additionally, we observed that the farm-level downscaling model exhibited lower error than those developed at the turbine level. The combined use of multiple NWP sources reduced forecasting errors by 8 %–30 % for direct and indirect WPFs, respectively. Direct and indirect forecasting methods present similar performance. Finally, the aggregated turbine-level improved WPF accuracy by 10 % and 15 % for RMSE and MAE, respectively, compared to farm-level WPF.