Accuracy of Wind Speed Predictability with Heights using Recurrent Neural Networks

Accurate prediction of wind speed in future time domain is critical for wind power integration into the grid. Wind speed is usually measured at lower heights while the hub heights of modern wind turbines are much higher in the range of 80-120m. This study attempts to better understand the predictability of wind speed with height. To achieve this, wind data was collected using Laser Illuminated Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) system at 20m, 40m, 50m, 60m, 80m, 100m, 120m, 140m, 160m, and 180m heights. This hourly averaged data is used for training and testing a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) for the prediction of wind speed for each of the future 12 hours, using 48 previous values. Detailed analyses of short-term wind speed prediction at different heights and future hours show that wind speed is predicted more accurately at higher heights.For example, the mean absolute percent error decreases from 0.19 to 0.16as the height increase from 20m to 180m, respectively for the 12th future hour prediction. The performance of the proposed method is compared with Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) method. Results show that RNN performed better than MLP for most of the cases presented here at the future 6th hour.