Accurate prediction of short-term wind speed is of great significance to the operation and maintenance of wind farms, the optimal scheduling of turbines, and the safe and stable operation of power grids. A prediction approach for short-term wind speed using ensemble empirical mode decomposition-permutation entropy and regularized extreme learning machine is proposed. Firstly, wind speed time series is decomposed into several components with different frequency by ensemble empirical mode decomposition, which can reduce the non-stationarity of the original time series. The permutation entropy value for each component is used to analyze its complexity. The components can be recombined to obtain a set of new subsequences. Then, different prediction models based on regularized extreme learning machine are used to predict each subsequence. Fivefold cross validation is used to improve the reliability of the regularized extreme learning machine model. Finally, the predicted value of each subsequence is superimposed to obtain the final predictive result. Ten minutes, 30 minutes, and 1 hour short-term wind speed data from wind farms in Liaoning Province, China, are used for conducting experiments. The experimental results indicate that the values of the root mean square error of the developed prediction approach utilizing 10 minutes, 30 minutes, and 1 hour interval data are 0.5629, 0.4473, and 0.5697; mean absolute error are 0.4427, 3.0701, and 0.4897; mean absolute percentile error are 4.1456%, 16.8166%, and 6.8166%; relative root mean square are 0.0505, 0.2997, and 0.2609; square sum error are 55.5263, 59.6347, and 64.9154; and the Theil inequality coefficient are 0.0235, 0.0808, and 0.0625, which are much lower than those of the comparison methods. The values of the R square of the developed prediction approach utilizing 10 minutes, 30 minutes, and 1 hour interval data are 0.9363, 0.9161, and 0.9472, and the index of agreement are 0.9994, 0.9925, and 0.9894, whichare higher than those of the comparison methods. The Pearson's test results show that the association strength between the actual value and the predicted values of the proposed approach is stronger. Also, the proposed prediction approach in this paper has higher reliability under the same confidence level. The effectiveness of the proposed prediction approach for short-term wind speed is verified.