Energies, Vol. 10, Pages 1967: A Simple and Effective Approach for the Prediction of Turbine Power Production From Wind Speed Forecast (Energies)

An accurate forecast of the power generated by a wind turbine is of paramount importance for its optimal exploitation. Several forecasting methods have been proposed either based on a physical modeling or using a statistical approach. All of them rely on the availability of high quality measures of local wind speed, corresponding generated power and on numerical weather forecasts. In this paper, a simple and effective wind power forecast technique, based on the probability distribution mapping of wind speed forecast and observed power data, is presented and it is applied to two turbines located on the island of Borkum (Germany) in the North Sea. The wind speed forecast of the ECMWF model at 100 m from the ground is used as the prognostic meteorological parameter. Training procedures are based entirely on relatively short time series of power measurements. Results show that our approach has skills that are similar or better than those obtained using more standard methods when measured with mean absolute error.