Spatial dispersion of wind speeds and its influence on the forecasting error of wind power in a wind farm

Big wind farms must be integrated to power system. Wind power from big wind farms, with randomness, volatility and intermittent, will bring adverse impacts on the connected power system. High precision wind power forecasting is helpful to reduce above adverse impacts. There are two kinds of wind power forecasting. One is to forecast wind power only based on its time series data. The other is to forecast wind power based on wind speeds from weather forecast. For a big wind farm, due to its spatial scale and dynamics of wind, wind speeds at different wind turbines are obviously different, that is called wind speed spatial dispersion. Spatial dispersion of wind speeds and its influence on the wind power forecasting errors have been studied in this paper. An error evaluation framework has been established to account for the errors caused by wind speed spatial dispersion. A case study of several wind farms has demonstrated that even if the forecasting average wind speed is accurate, the error caused by wind speed spatial dispersion cannot be ignored for the wind power forecasting of a wind farm.