Application of a novel generative adversarial network to wind power forecasting

Abstract

As the global economy rapidly develops, energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions have increased annually, prompting countries to strive for carbon neutrality by 2050. Accurate wind power forecasting can aid power system dispatch departments to obtain wind farms’ output and improve the power system’s new energy absorption capacity by coordinating multiple power generation resources. To this end, this study proposes a novel method for wind power forecasting: the Generative Adversarial Network method-based Deep Q Neural Network (GDQN). Wind power is a nonlinear model with random characteristics like dynamics and uncertainty. The GDQN generates wind power data similar to historical wind power data, solving the problem of insufficient wind power data samples by developing adversarial networks. The deep Q-learning network is then utilized to predict future wind power data. The experimental results based on the actual test of the total power generated by all wind turbines in a complete wind farm indicate that the proposed GDQN method can significantly reduce the Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE %) of wind power forecasting, as compared to other commonly used methods in wind power forecasting.