Decentralized forecasting of wind energy generation with an adaptive machine learning approach to support ancillary grid services

Abstract

We report on an approach to distributed wind power forecasting, which supports wind energy integration in power grid operation during exceptional and critical situations. Forecasts are generated on-site the wind power plant (WPP) in order to provide blackout-robust data transmission directly from the WPP to the grid operator. An adaptively trained forecasting model uses locally available sensor data to predict the available active power (AAP) signal in a probabilistic fashion. A forecast generated off-site based on numerical weather prediction (NWP) is deposited and combined on-site the WPP with the locally generated forecast. We evaluate the performance of the method in a case study and find that the locally generated forecast significantly improves forecast reliability for a short-term horizon, which is highly relevant for enabling power reserve provision from WPPs.