WIND POWER FORECASTING USING

ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORKS

Report submitted to the SASTRA

Deemed to be University as the
requirement for the course

ICT304

: SOFT COMPUTING TECHNIQUES

Submitted by

ANNASAGARAM SAI HEMANTH

(Reg. No.: 122004023, B. Tech ECE)

JUNE 2021

SCHOOL OF EEE
THANJAVUR, TAMIL NADU, INDIA – 613 401

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 SCHOOL OF EEE THANJAVUR –
613 401

Bonafide Certificate

This is to certify that the report titled “WIND POWER

FORECASTING USING ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORK”

submitted as a requirement for the course, ICT304: SOFT COMPUTING

TECHNIQUES for B.Tech. is a Bonafide record of the work done by Shri.

ANNASAGARAM SAI HEMANTH (Reg. No.122004023, B.Tech ECE)

during the academic year 2020-21, in the School of EEE.

Project Based Work Viva Voce held on

Examiner 1 Examiner 2

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 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First of all, I would like to thank God Almighty for his endless blessings.

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Dr. S.VaidyaSubramaniam, Vice –

Chancellor for his encouragement during the span of my academic life. I extend my
sincere thanks to Dr. K. Thenmozhi, Dean (SEEE), Dr. Sridhar k, Associate Dean (SEEE)
SASTRA Deemed to be University for providing the opportunity to pursue this project.

I owe a debt of most profound gratitude to my mentor Dr.Rajan sir for his valuable
inputs, able guidance, encouragement, wholehearted cooperation and constructive
criticism throughout my project on the topic “WIND POWER FORECASTING USING
ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORKS”.

I take this opportunity to thank all my lecturers who have directly or indirectly helped
me in my project.

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 List of Figures

Figure Title Page

No. No.
1 State Diagram for the Training Process 8
2 Feed Forward Layer 8
3 Plot Network Performance 9

4 Training State 10
5 Error Histogram 11

6 Linear Regression 11

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 Abstract

In recent years, everywhere in the world, wind energy features a stimulating growth, but
the matter with the system is that power generated from the wind is uncertain and
corresponding power. To affect this issue, many ideas are preferred by various researchers.
Recently, the synthetic Neural Networks (ANN) is employed an accurate method for this
type of applications. during this project, the forecasting of wind generation is presented for
a gaggle of sample wind power data with the assistance of multilayer ANN. For wind
generation forecasting, the temperature and wind speed are vital parameters. Now a day,
temporary wind speed forecasts become more important for the facility system
management or energy trading because of the high penetration of wind generation
technology and wind energy market developments. during this new era, instant wind speed
forecasting is required for producers and consumers to become stable electricity market as
in electric grid at any moment and thus the balance is maintained between consumption
and generation

KEY WORDS: Wind energy, Forecasting, ANN, Energy Market, Stable electricity

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 Table of Contents
Title Page No.

Bonafide certificate ii

Acknowledgements iii

List of Figures iv

Abstract v

1. Introduction 1
2. Literature Review 4
3. Methodology ang Implementation 6

4. Results and Discussions 9

5. Conclusion and Future Enhancements 13

6. References 14 .
 1. INTRODUCTION

In recent trend of the Indian power production and also in world’s power
production wind energy plays a major role. This is due to the reduction of
fossil fuels, rise of earth’s global temperature, greenhouse effect, melting of
Polar Regions the world is moving towards renewable side. Wind is the only
option for the generation companies to choose because of its availability.
But one main disadvantage of wind is uncertainty and it not always constant
because wind output power depends on wind speed. To overcome this
problem, we introduce a new concept of wind power forecasting in wind
mills. In India there is no proper system for forecasting power in wind mills.
Due to that improper forecasting, there is mismatch between the demand
and supply. Due to that mismatching, there occurs increasing or decreasing
of frequency from the constant value. So, the consumers load will be
affected due to that change in frequency. By proper forecasting, we can able
to balance the demand and supply, and there by maintaining constant
frequency.
To increase the grid stability and maintain the frequency by forecasting
the wind power by using artificial neural network. The objective of this study
is to compare results of the forecasted power using some of the different
approaches available. The dataset used for training was obtained from
London Meteorological data for the year 2016. I have prepared the data in
the excel sheet and read it in the matrix form in MATLAB. There were many
features from in the data and I needed to choose the relevant data for
training. The features like temperature and average temperature over a
particular period were important features. Another important feature which
was not present in the data but I added was the month of the data because
season has significant impact on wind speed. Finally, all the features were
integrated in the excel sheet and read from MATLAB.
Since generated wind power depend on atmospheric conditions, it has
been called as a non-dispatchable sources. Wind power forecasts are very
important to reduce the uncertainty and schedule the electricity generation
especially in power systems have a high-rate wind power.

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 There are two major uncertain values in this system and these are load
demand, renewable generation. When distribution companies and high
energy consumption factories such as steel factories forecast their
consumption, renewable power plants forecast their generation values to
submit their bids. Except bilateral contracts, all participants on demand side
and generation side must join the day ahead system to buy or sell power
energy. In short, forecast is not an option, it is an obligation for electric
market participants.
Wind power forecasts are classified according to the two different criteria
which are time span and structure. Forecasts are divided in four group as
long term, medium term, short term and very short term in term of time
span. Long term forecasts are from weeks to months or years and used for
wind power and power system planning. Medium term forecasts are from
days to weeks and used unit commitment and maintenance scheduling.
Short term forecasts are from hours to days and used for economic dispatch,
reserve requirement, intraday market and day ahead market. Lastly, very
short-term forecast are seconds to minutes and used for wind turbine
control and power system frequency control. The forecasts are also divided
in three group as physical, statistical and hybrid in terms of structure. In
physical model, physical structure of wind power plants and numerical
weather prediction data are considered. In statistical models, historical
meteorological data and wind power data are used. Hybrid model is a
combine of physical model and statistical model.
Wind power forecasting is used for the day-ahead scheduling of
conventional power plants and the trading of electricity on the competitive
market. Although the prediction accuracy of wind power forecasting is lower
than that of load forecasting. Wind power forecasts still play a key role in
addressing the operation challenges of a utility grid. Recently, several
methods are employed for wind power forecasting. Many studies have been
devoted to improvements in wind power forecasting approaches by
researchers with wide experience in the field tests. A number of wind power
forecasting methods have been developed and launched on wind farms. The
wind power forecasting methods can be generally categorized into six
groups: persistence method, physical method, statistical method, spatial
correlation method, artificial intelligence (AI) method, and hybrid method.

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NEURAL NETWORK:

Now-a-days, the application of neural network to the modern problems is extended to a

great extent. Neural network is used in decision making, approximation and precision
making and forecasting. This motivated the researchers to forecast the future power of the
windmill using neural network. Here we use the neural network is the mat lab software.

Here we use the neural network in the MATLAB software. Here we gave the past power
generation data of the wind mill with the corresponding speed data. Here we gave past
speed as an input and past corresponding power generation of the wind mill for the wind
speed which was given as input and corresponding is given as target. The past power
generation of windmill and their corresponding speed for the long interval of time. The
number of inputs increases the efficiency of the neural network prediction output. Here
supervised learning method of neural network is used for predicting the output power.
Here the given set of data is divided into three divisions. They are training, validation and
testing. The percentage of division of data for three processes are 70 percentage of data for
training, 15% for validating, 15% for testing. After that three process had been finished, we
gave a future wind speed, and then neural network finds the future power for
corresponding wind speed. The output obtained from the neural network can be compared
with the actual power curve, if the error occurs greater than particular permissible value.

Then that error can be rectified by adjusting the artificial neural network (ANN)
parameter like weight and bias. Weight and bias should be adapted till we attain the output
less than the permissible value. Weight and bias are ANN parameters which are used to
reduce the errors in the neural network. The data should be the correct one, and then the
only neural network gives the correct output for the future wind speed data. Neural
network is used for forecasting it can be able to learn the relation between the complicated
variable data. Neural network learns nature of data by training them. Here more than speed
data attributes of the main data like temperature, duration, speed also can be given as input
with the main speed data. This increases the efficiency of the forecasting.

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 2.LITERATURE REVIEW

Artificial Intelligence Methods:

Recently, with the development of artificial intelligence (AI), various new AI methods for
wind speed and power prediction have been developed. The new developed methods
include artificial neural network (ANN), adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS),
fuzzy logic methods, support vector machine (SVM), neuro-fuzzy network, and evolutionary
optimization algorithms. ANN could deal with non-linear and complex problems in terms of
classification or forecasting. The ANN models can represent a complex nonlinear
relationship and extract the dependence between variables through the training process.

ANN based methods include back propagation neural networks, recurrent neural
networks, radial basis function (RBF) neural networks, ridge let neural network, and
adaptive linear element neural network. ANN based method is an appropriate method to
apply into the problem to forecast the wind power. Sfetsos presented an ANN method for
the forecasting of mean hourly wind speed data using time series analysis. The proposed
methodology has an additional benefit for utility that have significant wind penetration
level and use hourly interval for power system operational procedures such as economic
dispatch and unit commitment.

Chang described a wind power forecasting methodologies based on back propagation

neural network. The developed model for short-term wind forecasting showed a very good
accuracy to be used by a 2400kW WECS in Taichung coast for the energy supply. More and
Deo presented two wind forecasting methodologies based on back propagation neural
network and recurrent neural network. The neural networks forecasting is found to be more
accurate than traditional statistical time series analysis. Chang gave a method to do time
series prediction forecast of wind power generation using RBF neural network. The good
agreements between the realistic values and forecasting values are obtained; the numerical
results show that the proposed forecasting method is accurate and reliable.
Guo et al investigated a modified empirical mode decomposition (EMD) based feed-
forward neural network (FNN) wind forecasting method.
The proposed method shows the best accuracy comparing with basic FNN and unmodified
EMD-based FNN through multi-step forecasting the mean monthly and daily wind speed in
Zhangye of China.
Li and Shi investigated three types of typical ANN, namely, adaptive linear element, back
propagation, and radial basis function, to forecast the wind speed. The comparing results
of three types of ANN show that even for the same wind dataset, no single ANN model
outperforms others universally in terms of all evaluation metrics.

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Hybrid Methods:
The object of hybrid models is to benefit from the advantages of each model and obtain a
globally optimal forecasting performance. Since the information contained in the individual
forecasting method is limited, hybrid method can maximize the available information,
integrate individual model information and make the best use of the advantages of multiple
forecasting methods thus improving the prediction accuracy. The hybrid methods combine
different approaches such as mixing physical and statistical approaches or combine short-
term and medium-term models.
Many types of hybrid models were utilized to predict wind power. The types of
combinations can be:
• Combination of physical and artificial intelligence approaches
• Combination of statistical and artificial intelligence approaches
• Combination of alternative artificial intelligence models

Zhao et al. investigated a hybrid wind forecasting method consists of an NWP model and
ANN models. The NWP model is established by coupling the Global Forecasting system (GFS)
with the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) system together to predict
meteorological parameters. This hybrid forecasting system is profitable for increasing the
wind energy penetration level in China. Shi et al. presented two hybrid models, namely,
ARIMA-ANN and ARIMA-SVM, for wind speed and power forecasting. This paper
systematically and comprehensively investigates the applicability of the proposed hybrid
models based on two case studies on wind speed and wind power generation, respectively.
The results show that the hybrid approaches are viable options for forecasting both wind
speed and wind power generation time series, but they do not always produce superior
forecasting performance for all the forecasting time horizons investigated. Guo et
al.described a new hybrid wind speed forecasting method based on a back propagation
neural network and the idea of eliminating seasonal effects from actual wind speed datasets
using seasonal exponential adjustment. The test results showed that the proposed method
performed better than the single back propagation neural network. Catalão et al. proposed
a hybrid approach, based on the combination of ANN with wavelet transform, for short-
term wind power forecasting in Portugal. The wavelet transform is used to decompose the
wind power series into a set of better-behaved constitutive series. The test results
presented confirm the considerable value of the proposed hybrid approach in forecasting
wind power.

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 3.METHODOLOGY AND IMPLEMENTATION

TRAINING:

The dataset that is used has 5 features as input. The neural network is generated using the
“fitnet” function. In the code, the fitnet function trains a neural network which has two
hidden layers along with the input and output layers. The first layer of the network has 5
neurons and it acts as the input layer with the vectors of sample data being given to it. Two
hidden layers are introduced with 10 and 5 neurons each to enable the network to learn
complex mathematical relationship in the dataset. I have used LM back propagation method
for training.

The Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm, also known as the damped least-squares method, has
been designed to work specifically with loss functions which take the form of a sum of
squared errors.

Consider a loss function which can be expressed as a sum of squared errors of the form
f = ∑ e i 2, i=0,..., m
Here m is the number of instances in the data set.

We can define the Jacobian matrix of the loss function as that containing the derivatives of
the errors with respect to the parameters,
J i,j f(w) = de i /dw j (i = 1,...,m & j = 1,...,n)

Where m is the number of instances in the data set and n is the number of parameters in the
neural network. Note that the size of the Jacobian matrix is m·n. The gradien t vector of the
loss function can be computed as:
ᐁf = 2 J T ·e
Here e is the vector of all error terms.

Finally, we can approximate the Hessian matrix with the following expression.
Hf ≈ 2 J T ·J + λI
Where λ is a damping factor that ensures the positiveness of the Hessian and I is the
identity matrix.

The next expression defines the parameters improvement process with the Levenberg-
Marquardt algorithm.
w i+1 = w i - (J i T ·J i +λ i I) -1 · (2 J i T ·e i ), i=0,1,...

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When the damping parameter λ is zero, this is just Newton's method, using the approximate
Hessian matrix. On the other hand, when λ is large, this becomes gradient descent with a
small training rate.

The parameter λ is initialized to be large so that first updates are small steps in the gradient
descent direction. If any iteration happens to result in a failure, then λ is increased by some
factor. Otherwise, as the loss decreases, λ is decreased, so that the Levenberg-Marquardt
algorithm approaches the Newton method. This process typically accelerates the
convergence to the minimum.

PROPOSED ALGORITHM:
Trainlm is a network training function that updates weight and bias values according to
Levenberg Marquardt optimization. Trainlm is often the fastest back propagation algor ithm
in the toolbox, and is highly recommended as a first-choice supervised algorithm, although
it does require more memory than other algorithms. It can create a standard network that
uses trainlm with feedforward net or cascadeforwardnet.

To prepare a custom network to be trained with trainlm,

• Set net.trainFcn to 'trainlm'. This sets net.trainParam to trainlm's default parameters
• Set net.trainParam properties to desired values

In either case, calling train with the resulting network trains the network with trainlm.
Trainlm supports training with validation and test vectors if the network's NET.divideFcn
property is set to a data division function. Validation vectors are used to stop training early
if the network performance on the validation vectors fails to improve or remains the same
for max_fail epochs in a row. Test vectors are used as a further check that the network is
generalizing well, but do not have any effect on training. Trainlm can train any network as
long as its weight, net input, and transfer functions have derivative functions.

Training stops when any of the following conditions occurs. The maximum number of
epochs (repetitions) is reached; The maximum amount of time is exceeded; Performance is
minimized to the goal; The performance gradient falls below min_grad; mu exceeds
mu_max;Validation performance has increased more than max_fail times since the last
time it decreased (when using validation).

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 The picture below represents a state diagram for the training process of a neural network
with the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm. The first step is to calculate the loss, the
gradient and the Hessian approximation. Then the damping parameter is adjusted so as to
reduce the loss at each iteration.

Fig1: State Diagram for the training process

The dataset that I used was split into Train, Validation and Test sets as follows: 70% is
used for training, 15% for validation and 15% for testing. The matrix of the dataset is then
sent for training using the MATLAB ‘train’ function which uses the above mentioned
Levenberg- Marquardt algorithm. To reduce the error, I tried many different things and
changed the hyper-parameters to reach the accuracy of 99% on the Validation and Test
splits.

Fig.2: Feed Forward Layer

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 4.RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

Feedforward networks have one-way connections from input to output layers. They are
most commonly used for prediction, pattern recognition, and nonlinear function fitting.
Supported feedforward networks include feedforward backpropagation, cascade-forward
backpropagation, feedforward input-delay backpropagation, linear, and perceptron
networks. A two-layer feedforward network with sigmoid hidden neurons and linear
output neurons. This type of network can fit multidimensional mapping problems
arbitrarily well, given consistent data and enough neurons in its hidden layer.

Plot network performance:

Syntax: plotperform(TR) // plotperform(TR) plots the training, validation, and test

performances given the training record TR returnedby the function train.

Fig.3: Plot Network Performance

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Plot train state:

Syntax: plottrainstate(tr) // plottrainstate(tr) plots the training statefrom a training record

tr returned by train.

Fig.4: Training State

Plot error histogram

Syntax: ploterrhist(e)
ploterrhist(e1,'name1',e2,'name2',...) ploterrhist(...,'bins',bins) //ploterrhist(e) plots a
histogram of errorvalues e. ploterrhist(e1,'name1',e2,'name2',...) takes any number of
errors and names and plots each pair. ploterrhist(...,'bins',bins) takes an optional property
name/value pair which defines the number of bins to use in the histogram plot. The
default is 20.

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 Fig.5: Error Histogram

Plot linear regression

Syntax:plotregression(targets,outputs)
plotregression(targs1,outs1,'name1',targs2,outs2,'name2',. ..)
//plotregression(targets,outputs) plots thelinear regression of targets relative to outputs.
plotregression(targs1,outs1,'name1',targs2,outs2,'name2',. ..) generatesmultiple plots.

Fig.6: Linear Regression

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Plot function fit

Syntax: plotfit(NET,INPUTS,TARGETS)
plotfit(targets1,inputs1,'name1',...) //plot
fit(NET,INPUTS,TARGETS) plots the output function of a network across the ra nge of the
inputs and also plots target TARGETS and output data points associated with values in
INPUTS. Error bars show the difference between outputs and INPUTS.
The plot appears only for networks with one input. Only the first output/targets appear if
the network has more than one output. plotfit(targets1,inputs1,'name1',...) displays series of
plots.

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 5.CONCLUSION AND FUTURE ENHANCEMENTS

The major application of this developed ANN is in forecasting of different periods of time.
It can be an applied system for power forecasting when a wind speed prediction system and
a weather parameters prediction system are cascaded with this ANN. This work shows the
capability of dispatching and for introducing wind plant in electrical market using ANN. If
the available data gathered previously from the wind site is enough sample and good
observations made for the site with other mentioned methods like Numerical Weather
Prediction (NWP) or ANN-Fuzzy methods combined, the forecasting errors will be
diminished notably. The future work is to forecast the upcoming output power of wind mill
not only by using past wind speed and its generation data for the past wind speed and also
its attributes like temperature, pressure, humidity, wind direction. By using main data and
with its attributes we can able to minimize the error in the output to small value and we can
able to increase the accuracy of the prediction model.

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 6.REFERENCES

[1] N. K. Kasabov, “Foundations of Neural Networks, Fuzzy Systems, and Knowledge

Engineering”, MIT Press, 3rd Edition,

[2] J. Lerner, M. Grundmeyer, M. Garver, “The Importance of Wind Forecasting”, Journal

of Renewable Energy Focus, Volume 10

[3] S.V.Manikanthan and T.Padmapriya “Recent Trends In M2m Communications In 4g

Networks And Evolution Towards 5g”, International Journal of Pure and Applied
Mathematics

[4] M. Baan, Ch. Jutten, “Neural Networks in Geophysical Applications,” Journal of

Geophysics, Volume 65,

[5] Sultan Al-Yahyai , Yassine Charabi , Abdullah AlBadi, Adel Gastli, “Wind resource
assessment using numerical weather prediction models and multi-criteria decision-making
technique: case study” International Journal of Renewable Energy Technology, Volume 4

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