Master of Science / Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering / Anil Pahwa / Electricity generation capacity from different renewable sources has been significantly growing worldwide in recent years, specially wind power. Fast dispatch of wind power provides flexibility for spinning reserve. However, wind is intermittent in nature. Thus, stable grid operations and energy management are becoming more challenging with the increasing penetration of wind in power systems. Efficient forecast methods can help the scenario. Many wind forecast models have been developed over the years. Highly effective models with the combination of numerical weather prediction and statistical models also exist at present. This study intends to develop a model to forecast hourly wind speed using an artificial neural network (ANN) approach for effective and fast operation with minimum data. The procedure is outlined in this work and the performance of the ANN model is compared with the persistence forecast model.

[pt] A variabilidade das fontes de energia renovável, como energia eólica, apresenta um desafio significativo para o operador do sistema elétrico, em especial para o médio prazo (de horas a dias à frente). Isos porque é um período crítico para tomada de decisões do setor, sendo influenciado tanto por dados recentes quanto por padrões mais amplos. O atual estudo propõe a utilização de uma rede convolucional para gerar cenários para as componentes u- (latitudinal) e v- (longitudinal) do vento, utilizando o algoritmo Redes Adversárias Generativas Condicionais para treinamento. O modelo gerador proposto foi comparado com o estado da arte para previsão meteorológica, um sistema de previsão numérica. Os resultados mostram que o modelo - tendo um custo computacional inferior, menos informações de entrada e estabilidade de longo prazo similar - foi capaz de superar o benchmark em um quarto dos meses do conjunto de teste na previsão de duas semanas à frente (28 passos de 12 horas). Além disso, as medianas das séries geradas são estatisticamente iguais às previstas pelo estado da arte em 71.97 por cento dos casos. / [en] The variability of renewable energy sources, such as wind power, presents a significant challenge for grid operators in maintaining operational stability. This is specially true to the medium-term (from hours to days ahead), which is both influenced by recent past data and broader trends and heavily influences decision making. This research proposes a Convolutional Generator Network conditioned on the previous step of u- (latitudinal) and v- (longitudinal) wind speed components to generate wind speed scenarios using the Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks training algorithm. The model is compared to the state of the art in weather forecasting, Numerical Weather Prediction Systems. The proposed generator model outperforms the benchmark for a forth of the months in the test dataset when predicting over two weeks (28 12-hourly steps) starting from a single data point with much lower computational cost, less input data and similar long-term stability. Additionally, its forecasts are statistically equal to the state-of-the-art in 71.97 percent of series.