Knowledge distillation with error-correcting transfer learning for wind power prediction

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel framework combining knowledge distillation and transfer learning for wind turbine power prediction, significantly improving accuracy and efficiency over existing methods.

Contribution

It is the first to incorporate knowledge distillation into energy forecasting and uses transfer learning to enhance turbine prediction models from park-scale weather data.

Findings

Performance improvements of 3.3% to 23.9% over competitors

Enhanced prediction quality and computational efficiency

Effective model correction using transfer learning

Abstract

Wind power prediction, especially for turbines, is vital for the operation, controllability, and economy of electricity companies. Hybrid methodologies combining advanced data science with weather forecasting have been incrementally applied to the predictions. Nevertheless, individually modeling massive turbines from scratch and downscaling weather forecasts to turbine size are neither easy nor economical. Aiming at it, this paper proposes a novel framework with mathematical underpinnings for turbine power prediction. This framework is the first time to incorporate knowledge distillation into energy forecasting, enabling accurate and economical constructions of turbine models by learning knowledge from the well-established park model. Besides, park-scale weather forecasts non-explicitly are mapped to turbines by transfer learning of predicted power errors, achieving model correction for better performance. The proposed framework is deployed on five turbines featuring various terrains in an Arctic wind park, the results are evaluated against the competitors of ablation investigation. The major findings reveal that the proposed framework, developed on favorable knowledge distillation and transfer learning parameters tuning, yields performance boosts from 3.3 % to 23.9 % over its competitors. This advantage also exists in terms of wind energy physics and computing efficiency, which are verified by the prediction quality rate and calculation time.