Development of a Hybrid Cloud-Enabled Forecasting Platform to Improve Wind Forecasting Applications in Brazil

The growth of low-cost wind energy continues to fast-track the world’s clean energy transition. Despite the global energy crisis in 2022, wind energy installations grew 9%, adding 78 GW to the portfolio total of 906 GW (GWEC, 2023). Collectively contributing to over two-thirds of new wind installations, the U.S., China, and Brazil remain strong leaders in the wind revolution. However, the integration of wind energy into the electrical grid continues to face old challenges while new ones start to emerge. Growing environmental and climate change concerns, together with the rapidly growing capacity in intermittent onshore and offshore locations, have made forecasting for wind generation a vital technology across the globe. Forecasts of high accuracy and reliability are highly desired for reliable grid operation at a reduced cost for businesses in the wind energy sector.

In order to combat these challenges and help organizations accelerate their sustainability goals, IBM developed the Renewables Forecasting Platform. The IBM Renewables Forecasting Platform is a hybrid and multi-cloud based forecasting platform that generates high-accuracy forecasts leveraging advanced analytics, sophisticated instrumentation, and best-in-class weather data. Powered by the geospatial analytics engine and weather datasets within the IBM Environmental Intelligence Suite (EIS), IBM machine learning models are trained using historical forecast, weather, measurement, and operational datasets. The automated models are trained and ensembled with weather situation categorization and smart model selection in near real-time. The resulting model is very robust, versatile, and accurate.

The presentation will first provide an overview of the platform including solution architecture, data assembly and analytics workflows, and user interface. The second half of the presentation will focus on a recent success story between IBM and Omega Energia:

Omega Energia, Brazil’s largest holder of renewable assets, has been leveraging IBM’s Renewables Forecasting Platform since 2019. The development between IBM and Omega is a cutting-edge forecasting solution that is bringing Omega significant benefits in maintenance planning, generation forecasting, and strategic planning. IBM’s forecasts for Omega have demonstrated a 30-40% improvement over public/government weather forecasts and significant cost savings due to improved maintenance and wind energy utilization. Omega is on a transformational journey to build a more sustainable future for its customers in Brazil and the world with digital innovation for renewables forecasting.