A new strategy for wind speed forecasting using hybrid intelligent models

Predicting wind power is considered as one of the most important tasks for the large-scale integration of intermittent wind-powered generators into power systems. Given the cubic relationship between wind speed and wind power, accurate forecasting of wind speed is important for the estimation of future wind power generation output. This paper presents a short-term wind speed forecasting technique using a hybrid intelligent algorithm that utilizes a data filtering technique based on wavelet transform (WT) and a soft computing model (SCM) based on fuzzy ARTMAP (FA) network. The effectiveness of the proposed hybrid WT+FA model is evaluated by comparing it with various other SCMs as well as hybrid models. The test results show that a significant reduction in forecast error of an individual FA network by more than 40% through the application of a combined FA and WT. The forecasting performance of the proposed WT+FA is not only robust and more effective than that of individual FA network but also it shows superiority over other considered SCMs. The forecasting techniques were tested using the real data from the North Cape wind farm located in PEI, Canada.