Wind Speed Forecasting Based on Data Decomposition and Deep Learning Models: A Case Study of a Wind Farm in Saudi Arabia

Abstract

With industrial and technological development and the increasing demand for electric power, wind energy has gradually become the fastest-growing and most environmentally friendly new energy source. Nevertheless, wind power generation is always accompanied by uncertainty due to the wind speed's volatility. Wind speed forecasting (WSF) is essential for power grids' dispatch, stability, and controllability, and its accuracy is crucial to effectively using wind resources. Therefore, this study proposes a novel WSF framework for stationary data based on a hybrid decomposition method and the Bidirectional Long Short-term Memory (BiLSTM) to achieve high forecasting accuracy for the Dumat Al-Jandal wind farm in Al-Jouf, Saudi Arabia. The hybrid decomposition method combines the Wavelet Packet Decomposition (WPD) and the Seasonal Adjustment Method (SAM). The SAM method eliminates the seasonal component of the decomposed subseries generated by WPD to reduce forecasting complexity. The BiLSTM is applied to forecast all the deseasonalized decomposed subseries. Five years of hourly wind speed observations acquired from a location in the Al-Jouf region were used to prove the effectiveness of the proposed model. The comparative experimental results, including 27 other models, demonstrated the proposed model's superiority in single and multiple WSF with an overall average mean absolute error of 0.176549, root mean square error of 0.247069, and R-squared error of 0.985987.