Copyright © 2013 Wen-Yeau Chang. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

An accurate forecasting method for power generation of the wind energy conversion system (WECS) is urgently needed under the relevant issues associated with the high penetration of wind power in the electricity system. This paper proposes a hybrid method that combines orthogonal least squares (OLS) algorithm and genetic algorithm (GA) to construct the radial basis function (RBF) neural network for short-term wind power forecasting. The RBF neural network is composed of three-layer structures, which contain the input, hidden, and output layers. The OLS algorithm is used to determine the optimal number of nodes in a hidden layer of RBF neural network. With an appropriate RBF neural network structure, the GA is then used to tune the parameters in the network, including the centers and widths of RBF and the connection weights in second stage. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, the method is tested on the practical information of wind power generation of a WECS installed in Taichung coast of Taiwan. Comparisons of forecasting performance are made to the persistence method and back propagation neural network. The good agreements between the realistic values and forecasting values are obtained; the test results show the proposed forecasting method is accurate and reliable.