Wind Energy generation depends on the existence of wind, a meteorological phenomena intermittent by nature, with the consequence of generating uncertainty on the availability of wind energy in the future. The grid stability processes require continuous forecasting of wind energy generated. Forecasting wind energy can be performed either by using weather forecast data or by projecting (or regressing) the past time-series data observations into the future. This last method is the statistical or time series approach. Wind Time Series show non-linearity and non-stationarity properties, and these two properties increase the complexity of the forecasting task using statistical methodologies. In this paper we explore the use of deep learning techniques, which can represent non-linearity, to the wind speed prediction using the largest public wind dataset available, the Wind Toolkit from the National Renewable Laboratory of the US. Several deep network architectures like Multi Layer Perceptrons, Convolutional Networks or Recurrent Networks have been tested on the 126,692 wind-sites and with the results obtained valuable comparisons and conclusions have been obtained. The distribution of the wind sites across the North American Geography has allowed to include in the analysis relationships between terrain, wind forecast complexity and deep methods. With the developed testing workbench and with the availability of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center new architectures are being developed. This work concludes with the feasibility of deep learning architectures for the wind and energy forecasting.

We thank the Barcelona Supercomputing Center for the extensive use of their infrastructure in this project, and the United States National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) for the use of their wind energy datasets. This work is partially supported by the Joint Study Agreement no. W156463 under the IBM/BSC Deep Learning Center agreement, by the Spanish Government through Programa Severo Ochoa (SEV-2015-0493), by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology through TIN2015-65316-P project, and by the Generalitat de Catalunya (contracts 2014-SGR-1051)

Peer Reviewed