Wind energy prediction and monitoring with neural computation

Wind energy has an important part to play as renewable energy resource in a sustainable world. For a reliable integration of wind energy high-dimensional wind time-series have to be analyzed. Fault analysis and prediction are an important aspect in this context. The objective of this work is to show how methods from neural computation can serve as forecasting and monitoring techniques, contributing to a successful integration of wind into sustainable and smart energy grids. We will employ support vector regression as prediction method for wind energy time-series. Furthermore, we will use dimension reduction techniques like self-organizing maps for monitoring of high-dimensional wind time-series. The methods are briefly introduced, related work is presented, and experimental case studies are exemplarily described. The experimental parts are based on real wind energy time-series data from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) western wind resource data set. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.