Forecasting High-Frequency Spatio-Temporal Wind Power with Dimensionally Reduced Echo State Networks

Abstract: Fast and accurate hourly forecasts of wind speed and power are crucial in quantifying and planning the energy budget in the electric grid. Modeling wind at a high resolution brings forth considerable challenges given its turbulent and highly nonlinear dynamics. In developing countries, where wind farms over a large domain are currently under construction or consideration, this is even more challenging given the necessity of modeling wind over space as well. In this work, we propose a machine learning approach to model the nonlinear hourly wind dynamics in Saudi Arabia with a domain-specific choice of knots to reduce the spatial dimensionality. Our results show that for locations highlighted as wind abundant by a previous work, our approach results in an 11% improvement in the two-hour-ahead forecasted power against operational standards in the wind energy sector, yielding a saving of nearly one million US dollars over a year under current market prices in Saudi Arabia.