Short Term Forecasting for Utility-Scale Wind Farms — The Power Model Challenge

Abstract

To date, many studies have focused on the mathematical modelling techniques for forecasting the production from wind farms, looking predominantly at the task of predicting the meteorological conditions at the site. This paper focuses on the final stage of the forecasting process-conversion from a meteorological forecast to a power production forecast. This challenge is particularly significant for utility-scale (>100MW) wind farms, where the simple application of a turbine manufacturer's power curve is insufficient to capture the true behaviour and interaction of the wind turbines over the whole site. This paper shows that the errors introduced by this power conversion process can be significantly reduced through the use of more advanced power modelling methods. A market trading scenario is considered and the increase in annual trading revenue for an example 100MW wind farm when using an advanced power model is estimated to be €180,000.