Cross-Domain Offshore Wind Power Forecasting: Transfer Learning Through Meteorological Clusters

TL;DR

This paper introduces a transfer learning framework for offshore wind power forecasting that clusters meteorological data to improve accuracy with limited site-specific data, validated on eight farms.

Contribution

It proposes a novel ensemble transfer learning method based on meteorological clustering, enabling accurate cross-domain wind power forecasts with minimal data.

Findings

Achieved a MAE of 3.52% in power forecasting.

Reliable forecasts obtained with less than five months of data.

Demonstrated effectiveness across eight offshore wind farms.

Abstract

Ambitious decarbonisation targets are rapidly increasing the commission of new offshore wind farms. For these newly commissioned plants to run, accurate power forecasts are needed from the onset. These allow grid stability, good reserve management and efficient energy trading. Despite machine learning models having strong performances, they tend to require large volumes of site-specific data that new farms do not yet have. To overcome this data scarcity, we propose a novel transfer learning framework that clusters power output according to covariate meteorological features. Rather than training a single, general-purpose model, we thus forecast with an ensemble of expert models, each trained on a cluster. As these pre-trained models each specialise in a distinct weather pattern, they adapt efficiently to new sites and capture transferable, climate-dependent dynamics. Our contributions are two-fold - we propose this novel framework and comprehensively evaluate it on eight offshore wind farms, achieving accurate cross-domain forecasting with under five months of site-specific data. Our experiments achieve a MAE of 3.52\%, providing empirical verification that reliable forecasts do not require a full annual cycle. Beyond power forecasting, this climate-aware transfer learning method opens new opportunities for offshore wind applications such as early-stage wind resource assessment, where reducing data requirements can significantly accelerate project development whilst effectively mitigating its inherent risks.