Demystifying The Use Of Era5-Land And Machine Learning For Wind Power Forecasting

Wind is a highly unstable renewable energy source. Accurate forecasting can mitigate the effects of wind inconsistency on the electric grid and help avoid investments in costly energy storage infrastructure. Basing the predictions on open-source forecast models and climate data also makes them entirely free of charge. The present work studies the feasibility of using two machine learning (ML) models and one deep learning (DL) model, random forest (RF) regression, support vector regression (SVR), and long short-term memory (LSTM) for short-term wind power forecasting based on the publicly accessible ERA5-Land dataset. For each forecast model, a selection of hyperparameters is first tuned, followed by determining the best performing input data structure using surrounding data grid points and increasing the time interval of data affecting a single prediction. Both the ML models and the DL model perform better than the baseline (BL) model when forecasting wind speed up to 24 hours ahead. However, a reduced forecast duration is needed to achieve satisfactory wind turbine (WT) power output forecast accuracy. Most notably, the RF is able to produce 3-hour forecasts with the combined WT power output prediction error amounting to less than 10 % of the WT's nominal power.