Wind power prediction based on deep learning models: The case of Adama wind farm

Wind is a renewable energy source that is used to generate electricity. Wind power is one of the suitable solutions for global warming since it is free from pollution, doesn't cause greenhouse effects, and it is a natural source of energy. However, Wind power generation highly depends on weather conditions. It is very difficult to easily predict the amount of power generated from wind at a particular instant in time. Adama wind power farm is one of the wind farms in Ethiopia. There is no accurate and reliable forecasting model for the Adama wind farm that enables the forecasting of the power generated from the farm. The main objective of this research is to develop a wind power forecasting model for the Adama wind farm using deep learning techniques. Forecasting of wind power generation capacity involves appropriate modeling techniques that use past wind power generation data. The experiments have been conducted using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU). To achieve the highest forecasting accuracy, four years of data (from 2016 to 2019), with 5-min intervals, have been collected with a total of 163,802 rows. For hyperparameter optimization grid search and random search techniques have been utilized. The performances of the proposed deep learning models were investigated error metrics, including Mean Absolute Errors (MAE) and the Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE), Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) and R squared (R²). Bi-LSTM outperforms the other two algorithms, scoring 0.644, 0.388, 0.769 and 0.978 MAE, MAPE, RMSE and R² values respectively. Such wind power forecasting helps energy planners and regional power providers to compute power production and energy generated from other sources.