Enhancing Short-Term Wind Power Forecasting through Multiresolution Analysis and Echo State Networks

This article suggests the application of multiresolution analysis by Wavelet Transform—WT and Echo State Networks—ESN for the development of tools capable of providing wind speed and power generation forecasting. The models were developed to forecast the hourly mean wind speeds, which are applied to the wind turbine’s power curve to obtain wind power forecasts with horizons ranging from 1 to 24 h ahead, for three different locations of the Brazilian Northeast. The average improvement of Normalized Mean Absolute Error—NMAE for the first six, twelve, eighteen and twenty-four hourly power generation forecasts obtained by using the models proposed in this article were 70.87%, 71.99%, 67.77% and 58.52%, respectively. These results of improvements in relation to the Persistence Model—PM are among the best published results to date for wind power forecasting. The adopted methodology was adequate, assuring statistically reliable forecasts. When comparing the performance of fully-connected feedforward Artificial Neural Networks—ANN and ESN, it was observed that both are powerful time series forecasting tools, but the ESN proved to be more suited for wind power forecasting.