Meteorology-Driven Multi-Task Wind Power Forecasting Method Under Operating Condition Variations

Rapid changes in meteorological conditions can lead to frequent switching of wind turbine operating states, causing wind power sequences to exhibit pronounced non-stationarity and multimodal characteristics. As a result, conventional single prediction models often struggle to simultaneously maintain forecasting accuracy and stability under different operating conditions. To address this issue, this paper proposes a wind power forecasting method based on the Convolutional Normalized Transformer Encoder and Multi-Task Learning (CNTE-MTL). First, operating samples of wind turbines are divided into different operating conditions according to typical meteorological variables, such as wind speed, wind direction, and ambient temperature, to characterize differences in meteorology-driven operating patterns. Then, wind power forecasting under different meteorological conditions is formulated as multiple related subtasks, and a multi-task learning framework consisting of a shared feature extraction network and condition-specific prediction heads is constructed. In this framework, the shared feature extraction network employs one-dimensional convolution to extract local temporal fluctuation information and combines it with a Transformer encoder to capture long-term dependency features. The condition-specific prediction heads further characterize the differentiated power evolution patterns under different meteorological conditions, thereby enabling the sharing of common cross-condition information and differentiated modeling. Short-term forecasting, long-term forecasting, supplementary comparative experiments, and ablation experiments are conducted based on SCADA data from an actual wind farm. The results show that the proposed CNTE-MTL model achieves an RMSE of 0.0165 and an R2 of 0.9689 in the one-month short-term forecasting experiment, and an RMSE of 0.0072 and an R2 of 0.9980 in the three-month long-term forecasting experiment, outperforming comparative models such as CNTE, Informer, Transformer, TCN, and LSTM. The ablation experiments further verify the effectiveness of meteorology-driven operating condition division, the shared feature extraction network, and the condition-specific prediction heads in improving forecasting performance.