Achieving Skilled and Reliable Daily Probabilistic Forecasts of Wind Power at Subseasonal-to-Seasonal Timescales over France

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel wind power forecasting pipeline for France that extends prediction horizons up to 46 days, improving accuracy and calibration over existing methods for subseasonal-to-seasonal timescales.

Contribution

A lead time and weather model agnostic pipeline transforming ECMWF forecasts into wind power predictions up to 46 days ahead, with improved skill and calibration.

Findings

Forecasts improve climatological baseline by up to 15% for CRPS and 20% for ensemble MSE up to 16 days ahead.

Forecast calibration is near perfect across all lead times.

Extended forecasts up to two weeks can benefit renewable energy decision-making.

Abstract

In a growing renewable based energy system, accurate and reliable wind power forecasts are crucial for grid stability, balancing supply and demand and market risk management. Even though short-term weather forecasts have been thoroughly used to provide up to 3 days ahead renewable power predictions, forecasts involving prediction horizons longer than a week still need investigations. Despite the recent progress in subseasonal-to-seasonal weather probabilistic forecasting, their use for wind power prediction usually involves both temporal and spatial aggregation to achieve reasonable skill. In this study, we present a lead time and numerical weather model agnostic forecasting pipeline which enables to transform ECMWF subseasonal-to-seasonal weather forecasts into wind power forecasts for France for lead times ranging from 1 day to 46 days at daily resolution. By leveraging a post-processing step of the resulting power ensembles we show that these forecasts improve the climatological baseline by 15% to 5% for the Continuous Ranked Probability Score and 20% to 5% for ensemble Mean Squared Error up to 16 days in advance, before converging towards the climatological skill. This improvement in skill is jointly obtained with near perfect calibration of the forecasts for every lead time. The results suggest that electricity market players could benefit from the extended forecast range up to two weeks to improve their decision making on renewable supply