On the wake effect in wind farm power forecasting: a new data-driven approach

Wind power generation differs from other energy sources, such as thermal, solar or hydro, due to the inherent stochastic nature of wind. For this reason wind power forecasting, especially for wind farms, is a complex task that cannot be accurately solved with traditional statistical methods or needs large computational systems if physical models are used. Recently, the so-called learning approaches are considered a good compromise among the previous methods since they are able to integrate physical phenomena such as wake effects without presenting heavy computational loads. The present work deals with an innovative method to forecast wind power generation in a wind farm with a combination of GISbased methods, neural network approach and a wake physical model. This innovative method was tested with a wind farm located in Sicily (Italy), used as a case study. It consists of 30 identical wind turbines (850 kW each one), located at different heights, for an overall Power peak of 25 MW. The time series dataset consists of one year with a sampling time of 10 minutes considering wind speeds and wind directions. The output of this innovative model leaded to good results, especially for medium-term overall energy production forecast for the case study.