Deep learning architectures applied to wind time series multi-step forecasting

Forecasting is a critical task for the integration of wind-generated energy into electricity grids. Numerical weather models applied to wind prediction, work with grid sizes too large to reproduce all the local features that influence wind, thus making the use of time series with past observations a...

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Detalhes bibliográficos
Autor: Manero Font, Jaume
Tipo de documento: Tese de doutorado
Data de publicação:2020
País:España
Recursos:Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)
Repositório:UPCommons. Portal del coneixement obert de la UPC
Idioma:Inglês
OAI Identifier:oai:upcommons.upc.edu:2117/328183
Acesso em linha:https://hdl.handle.net/2117/328183
https://dx.doi.org/10.5821/dissertation-2117-328183
Nível de acesso:Acesso aberto
Palavra-chave:Deep learning
Wind prediction
Time series forecasting
Multi-step prediction
CNN Architecture
RNN architecture
Spectral analysis
Forecastability
Predicció vent
Preidicción viento
Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Informàtica
Descrição
Resumo:Forecasting is a critical task for the integration of wind-generated energy into electricity grids. Numerical weather models applied to wind prediction, work with grid sizes too large to reproduce all the local features that influence wind, thus making the use of time series with past observations a necessary tool for wind forecasting. This research work is about the application of deep neural networks to multi-step forecasting using multivariate time series as an input, to forecast wind speed at 12 hours ahead. Wind time series are sequences of meteorological observations like wind speed, temperature, pressure, humidity, and direction. Wind series have two statistically relevant properties; non-linearity and non-stationarity, which makes the modelling with traditional statistical tools very inaccurate. In this thesis we design, test and validate novel deep learning models for the wind energy prediction task, applying new deep architectures to the largest open wind data repository available from the National Renewable Laboratory of the US (NREL) with 126,692 wind sites evenly distributed on the US geography. The heterogeneity of the series, obtained from several data origins, allows us to obtain conclusions about the level of fitness of each model to time series that range from highly stationary locations to variable sites from complex areas. We propose Multi-Layer, Convolutional and recurrent Networks as basic building blocks, and then combined into heterogeneous architectures with different variants, trained with optimisation strategies like drop and skip connections, early stopping, adaptive learning rates, filters and kernels of different sizes, between others. The architectures are optimised by the use of structured hyper-parameter setting strategies to obtain the best performing model across the whole dataset. The learning capabilities of the architectures applied to the various sites find relationships between the site characteristics (terrain complexity, wind variability, geographical location) and the model accuracy, establishing novel measures of site predictability relating the fit of the models with indexes from time series spectral or stationary analysis. The designed methods offer new, and superior, alternatives to traditional methods.