EU, U.S. work to improve wind forecastingPublished: May 8, 2007 at 11:12 AM MILAN, Italy, May 8 (UPI) -- The key to improving wind power production forecasts is in understanding and predicting large changes in the system, several forecast company officials say."Event-based forecasting is one of the most promising approaches," said John Zack, of AWS Truewind, LLC, Albany, N.Y. Hourly wind power production is predicted using regional wind forecasts, measurements from the wind power plant and data from offsite locations. Traditionally, only one numerical weather prediction model is used in forecasting; each country uses its own national weather service. One of the more recent approaches to predictions in Europe has been to combine weather predictions from different countries because the domains overlap. Taking different inputs and combining them makes for a better indicator of the weather, said Ulrich Focken, director of Energy and Meteo Systems, Germany. "Data quality directly affects the forecast," said Ignacio Marti, of CENER, Spain. Only 12 of the most efficient European weather services are used in Energy and Meteo Systems forecasting. In Zack's company, several phenomena in weather and wind power production greatly alter the forecasting, and finding a way to more accurately measure large ramps, or changes, in power production is a top priority. The large changes are often caused by some sort of large-scale weather system or thunderstorms, or sometimes by the engineering of the turbine, which cuts off when it reaches a peak speed. By having separate forecasting schemes for each type of change, forecasting improved by 10 percent to 15 percent, Zack said. It could be improved further by better offsite measurements.
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