Wind Turbine Power Curve Modeling with a Hybrid Machine Learning Technique

Abstract

A power curve of a wind turbine describes the nonlinear relationship between wind speed and the corresponding power output. It shows the generation performance of a wind turbine. It plays vital roles in wind power forecasting, wind energy potential estimation, wind turbine selection, and wind turbine condition monitoring. In this paper, a hybrid power curve modeling technique is proposed. First, fuzzy c-means clustering is employed to detect and remove outliers from the original wind data. Then, different extreme learning machines are trained with the processed data. The corresponding wind power forecasts can also be obtained with the trained models. Finally, support vector regression is used to take advantage of different forecasts from different models. The results show that (1) five-parameter logistic function is superior to the others among the parametric models; (2) generally, nonparametric power curve models perform better than parametric models; (3) the proposed hybrid model can generate more accurate power output estimations than the other compared models, thus resulting in better wind turbine power curves. Overall, the proposed hybrid strategy can also be applied in power curve modeling, and is an effective tool to get better wind turbine power curves, even when the collected wind data is corrupted by outliers.