Short-Term Wind Power Forecasting Using Mixed Input Feature-Based Cascade-connected Artificial Neural Networks

Accurate short-term wind power forecasting is crucial for the efficient operation of power systems with high wind power penetration. Many forecasting approaches have been developed in the past to forecast short-term wind power. Artificial neural network-based approaches (ANNs) have become one of the most effective and popular short-term wind speed and wind power forecasting approaches in recent years. However, most researchers have used only historical data from a specific station to train the ANNs without considering meteorological variables from many neighboring stations on the forecasting performance. Using additional meteorological variables from neighboring stations can contribute valuable surrounding information to the forecasting model of the target station and improve ANNs performance. In this paper, a mixed input features-based cascade-connected artificial neural network (MIF-CANN) is used to train input features from many neighboring stations without encountering overfitting issues caused by many input features. Multiple ANNs train different combinations of input features in the first layer of the MIF-CANN model to produce preliminary results, then cascading into the second phase of the MIF-CANN model as inputs. The performance of the proposed MIF-CANN model is compared with the ANNs-based spatial correlation models. Simulation results show that the proposed MIF-CANN has better performance than the ANNs-based spatial correlation models.