IEA Wind Task 36 on Wind Power Forecasting and Future Research Issues

Wind power forecasts have been used operatively for over 20 years. Despite this fact, there are still several possibilities to improve the forecasts, both from the weather prediction side and from the usage of the forecasts. The International Energy Agency (IEA) Task on Wind Power Forecasting tries to organise international collaboration, among national weather centres with an interest and/or large projects on wind forecast improvements (NOAA, DWD, UK MetOffice, …) and operational forecaster and forecast users.

The Task is divided in three work packages: Firstly, a collaboration on the improvement of the scientific basis for the wind predictions themselves. This includes numerical weather prediction model physics, but also widely distributed information on accessible datasets. Secondly, we will be aiming at an international pre-standard (a so-called IEA Recommended Practice) on benchmarking and comparing wind power forecasts, including probabilistic forecasts. This WP will also organise benchmarks, in cooperation with the IEA Task WakeBench. Thirdly, we will be engaging end users aiming at dissemination of the best practice in the usage of wind power predictions.

This talk gives an overview of the IEA Wind Task for Wind Power Forecasting. The Operating Agent is Gregor Giebel of DTU, Co-Operating Agent is Joel Cline of the US Department of Energy. Collaboration in the task is solicited from everyone interested in the forecasting business. We will collaborate with IEA Task 31 Wakebench, which developed the Windbench benchmarking platform, which this task will use for forecasting benchmarks. The task runs for three years, 2016-2018.  

Main deliverables are an up-to-date list of current projects and main project results, including datasets which can be used by researchers around the world to improve their own models, an IEA Recommended Practice on performance evaluation of probabilistic forecasts, a position paper regarding the use of probabilistic forecasts, and one or more benchmark studies implemented on the Windbench platform hosted at CENER. Additionally, spreading of relevant information in both the forecasters and the users community is paramount.

The talk also introduces the work done in the first year of the Task, e.g. the collection of available datasets and the learnings from a public workshop on 9 June in Barcelona on Experiences with the Use of Forecasts and Gaps in Research. On this workshop, the audience presented their views on the directions for future research. Largely, there were three main routes for improvements: the “low-hanging fruits”, which essentially is using known technology and applies it to the imminent problems of the users. Higher temporal resolution or more frequent updates of the models are such issues. The running of a Rapid Update Cycle model is another possibility, but requires more resources in computation and available data. The second category are improvements which are underway already, but need to be operationalised and made available for the end user. The resolution of weather phenomena below 1 km spatial extent is one of those, data assimilation, short-term ensemble systems or improved model physics are other ones. Finally, the work of the Task is going to investigate farm-farm interaction and the required accuracy in wind direction, spatio-temporal, seasonal and ramp forecasting, and the optimal use of probabilistic forecasts including the accuracy of the extreme quantiles.

Participation in the Task is open for all institutions in member states of the IEA Annex on Wind Power, see ieawind.org for the up-to-date list.