Deep Federated Learning-Based Privacy-Preserving Wind Power Forecasting

Given the growing installed capacity, wind energy will exert a profound impact on the flexibility of modern energy systems. Wind power forecasting is a practical solution for dealing with the attributed variations and uncertainties, balancing supply and demand, and improving the reliability of the system. To achieve more accurate and generalizable forecast models, comprehensive data sets, supplied by multiple wind farms owing to their spatio-temporal dependencies, are required. In addition, data aggregation/collaboration across many wind farms scattered around a country is difficult, if not impossible, due to complex administrative processes, industry competition, and data privacy and security concerns. This article offers federated learning-based wind energy forecasting as a novel decentralized collaborative modeling method capable of training a single model on data from many wind farms without jeopardizing the privacy or security of data. To this end, rather than sending private data across sites, local model parameters are securely transmitted. A comparison between the proposed private distributed model and non-private centralized and fully private localized models indicates the high performance of the proposed federated learning-based wind power forecasting with 87.96% accuracy. Enjoying the smoothing effect, the higher generalizability of the proposed model with 83.63% accuracy is also substantiated in comparison to localized and centralized approaches while the privacy of the underlying data is preserved.