Probabilistic Wind Speed Forecasting for Wind Turbine Allocation in the Power Grid

To face the growing electricity demand, several countries have adopted the solution of clean energy and use renewable energy sources (e.g., wind and solar) to reinforce the stability of the power network, especially during peak demand periods. Forecasting wind power generation is one of the important tasks for the network regulator. This paper deals with the probabilistic forecasting of hourly wind speed time series. In this approach, instead of evaluating a single-point forecast, an intraday interval prediction is provided, which allows modeling the probability distribution of the wind speed process at any specific hour. Practically, the quantification of uncertainty might be of particular interest for risk management purposes associated with wind power generation. The definition of interval prediction is based on the notion of conditional quantiles. In this paper, we introduce a new statistical approach, which deals with the nonstationarity behavior of the wind speed process, to define the conditional quantile predictor. The proposed approach was applied and evaluated on hourly wind speed processes. The suggested methodology provides accurate single-point forecasts using the conditional median as the predictor. Furthermore, the obtained hourly interval predictions are small and well adapted to the shape of the daily wind speed curves, which confirms the efficiency of the proposed approach.