Synthesis of sample paths of wind power through factor analysis & cluster analysis

The purpose of this paper is to synthesize sample paths of wind power from a wind farm in a certain location by considering the wind power variability in that location. In order to achieve this purpose, factors driving wind power variability are extracted from wind power time series through factor analysis. Then, wind farms with similar factor loadings are clustered through an agglomerative hierarchical cluster analysis. In those two processes, the number of factors and clusters are decided heuristically. The seasonal variation of wind farm clusters is also analyzed, and the relative variability among wind farms is plotted in a dendrogram of wind farm clusters. The factor loadings and statistical characteristics of wind power in the selected cluster are used to synthesize the future sample path of a wind farm in that cluster. Finally, the synthesized wind power is verified by testing whether the distribution of the minute by minute difference between wind power data follows the Laplace distribution.