An unsupervised learning approach for predicting wind farm power and
downstream wakes using weather patterns
Abstract
Wind energy resource assessment typically requires numerical modelling,
but this is too computationally intensive for multi-year timescales.
Increasingly, unsupervised machine learning techniques are used to
identify small numbers of representative weather patterns that can help
simulate long-term behaviour. Here we develop a novel wind energy
workflow that for the first time combines the weather patterns from
unsupervised clustering with a numerical weather prediction model (WRF)
to obtain efficient and accurate long-term predictions of wind farm
power and downstream wakes. We use ERA5 reanalysis data and, for the
first time, compare clustering on low altitude pressure and wind
velocity, a more relevant variable for wind resource assessment. We also
compare varying domain sizes for the clustering. A WRF simulation is run
at each cluster centre and the results aggregated into a long-term
prediction using a novel post-processing technique. We consider two case
study regions and show that our long-term predictions achieve excellent
agreement with a year of WRF simulations in 2% of the computational
time. The most accurate results are obtained when clustering on wind
velocity. Clustering over a Europe-wide domain is sufficient for
predicting wind farm power output, but clustering over smaller domains
is required for downstream wake predictions.
Our
approach facilitates multi-year predictions of power output and
downstream farm wakes, by providing a fast, accurate and flexible
methodology applicable to any global region. Moreover, this constitutes
the first tool to help mitigate effects of wind energy loss downstream
of wind farms, via the identification of optimum wind farm locations.