Short-Range Wind Speed Predictions in Subtropical Region Using Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Short-range wind speed predictions for subtropical region is performed by applying Artificial Neural Network (ANN) technique to the hourly time series representative of the site. To train the ANN and validate the technique, data for one year are collected by one tower, with anemometers installed at heights of 101.8, 81.8, 25.7, and 10.0 m. Different ANN configurations to Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), a deep learning algorithm based method, are applied for each site and height. A quantitative analysis is conducted and the statistical results are evaluated to select the configuration that best predicts the real data. These methods have lower computational costs than other techniques, such as numerical modelling. The proposed method is an important scientific contribution for reliable large-scale wind power forecasting and integration into existing grid systems in Uruguay. The best results of the short-term wind speed forecasting was for MLP, which performed the forecasts using a hybrid method based on recursive inference, followed by LSTM, at all the anemometer heights tested, suggesting that this method is a powerful tool that can help the Administración Nacional de Usinas y Transmissiones Eléctricas manage the national energy supply.

Keywords

• computational intelligence
• artificial neural networks
• wind energy and wind speed forecasting
• computational modelling
• computer science