Augmented Convolutional Network for Wind Power Prediction: A New Recurrent Architecture Design with Spatial-temporal Image Inputs

Due to the stochastic and non-stationary characteristics of wind speed, the wind power generation is highly uncertain and fluctuating, which significantly challenges the operation of the power system and the associated electricity market. In this article, a new spatial-temporal method is proposed for short-term wind power prediction based on image inputs and augmented convolutional network. First, the geographical locations of various wind farms and the relevant wind vectors are processed into a series of multiframe spatial-temporal wind images, which can be handled by the convolutional networks. Then, wind power conversion and prediction models are developed based on those networks, where recurrent paths and attention mechanism are introduced to enhance the model architecture. The testing results have validated the high performance of the proposed method within a forecast horizon of up to seven hours. In particular, even when the terrain information is not available, the implicit wind flow field within the original inputs can still be approximately learned by the proposed convolutional networks.