Integrating Physics and Data-Driven Approaches: An Explainable and Uncertainty-Aware Hybrid Model for Wind Turbine Power Prediction

Abstract: The rapid growth of the wind energy sector underscores the urgent need to optimize turbine operations and ensure effective maintenance through early fault detection systems. While traditional empirical and physics-based models offer approximate predictions of power generation based on wind speed, they often fail to capture the complex, non-linear relationships between other input variables and the resulting power output. Data-driven machine learning methods present a promising avenue for improving wind turbine modeling by leveraging large datasets, enhancing prediction accuracy but often at the cost of interpretability. In this study, we propose a hybrid semi-parametric model that combines the strengths of both approaches, applied to a dataset from a wind farm with four turbines. The model integrates a physics-inspired submodel, providing a reasonable approximation of power generation, with a non-parametric submodel that predicts the residuals. This non-parametric submodel is trained on a broader range of variables to account for phenomena not captured by the physics-based component. The hybrid model achieves a 37% improvement in prediction accuracy over the physics-based model. To enhance interpretability, SHAP values are used to analyze the influence of input features on the residual submodel's output. Additionally, prediction uncertainties are quantified using a conformalized quantile regression method. The combination of these techniques, alongside the physics grounding of the parametric submodel, provides a flexible, accurate, and reliable framework. Ultimately, this study opens the door for evaluating the impact of unmodeled variables on wind turbine power generation, offering a basis for potential optimization.