After the Wind Forecast Improvement Project - What are DOE's Plans for the Future?

Between $100-300M in annual operating costs can be saved through forecasting accuracy improvements of as little as 20-30%. As the amount of wind energy on the grid increases, these operating costs will continue to increase linearly with installed capacity. For example, once wind energy becomes 10% of total U.S. energy production (up from ~3.5% in 2012), forecast accuracy improvements will add over $1B per year to the wind industry's bottom line.

Moving ahead after the Wind Forecast Improvement Project, DOE has goals to improve the short term (0-6 hour) and day ahead wind forecasting on utility operations through improved understanding and modeling of the physics driving the wind at levels of interest to the wind industry. This requires improvements and integration of data campaigns, differing terrains, stabilities, analysis of power, economics and develop decision support tools that convey probabilistic forecast information and forecast reliability for utility operations. The discussion will examine the role of DOE moving forward for the next 7-10 years in this arena.