Probabilistic Forecasts of Wind Power Generation Accounting for Geographically Dispersed Information

Forecasts of wind power generation in their probabilistic form are a necessary input to decision-making problems for reliable and economic power systems operations in a smart grid context. Thanks to the wealth of spatially distributed data, also of high temporal resolution, such forecasts may be optimized by accounting for spatio-temporal effects that are so far merely considered. The way these effects may be included in relevant models is described for the case of both parametric and non-parametric approaches to generating probabilistic forecasts. The resulting predictions are evaluated on the real-world test case of a large offshore wind farm in Denmark (Nysted, 165 MW), where a portfolio of 19 other wind farms is seen as a set of geographically distributed sensors, for lead times between 15 minutes and 8 hours. Forecast improvements are shown to mainly come from the spatio-temporal correction of the first order moments of predictive densities. The best performing approach, based on adaptive quantile regression, using spatially corrected point forecasts as input, consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art benchmark based on local information only, by 1.5%-4.6%, depending upon the lead time.