Extreme learning approach with wavelet transform function for forecasting wind turbine wake effect to improve wind farm efficiency

Abstract A wind turbine operating in the wake of another turbine and has a reduced power production because of a lower wind speed after rotor. The flow field in the wake behind the first row turbines is characterized by a significant deficit in wind velocity and increased levels of turbulence intensity. To maximize the wind farm net profit, the number of turbines installed in the wind farm should be different in depend on wind farm project investment parameters. Therefore modeling wake effect is necessary because it has a great influence on the actual energy output of a wind farm. In this paper, the extreme learning machine (ELM) coupled with wavelet transform (ELM-WAVELET) is used for the prediction of wind turbine wake effect in wind far. Estimation and prediction results of ELM-WAVELET model are compared with the ELM, genetic programming (GP), support vector machine (SVM) and artificial neural network (ANN) models. The following error and correlation functions are applied to evaluate the proposed models: Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), Coefficient of Determination ( R 2 ) and Pearson coefficient ( r ). The experimental results show that an improvement in predictive accuracy and capability of generalization can be achieved by ELM-WAVELET approach (RMSE = 0.269) in comparison with the ELM (RMSE = 0.27), SVM (RMSE = 0.432), ANN (RMSE = 0.432) and GP model (RMSE = 0.433).