In support of Vestas’ efforts to provide forward-looking renewable energy solutions, the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) has announced that Vestas was awarded funding to develop a new short-term wind energy forecasting solution for Australia.
The solution will allow ARENA to more accurately forecast energy generation from wind power plants, reduce wind generators’ dispatch uncertainty, and improve system stability by better anticipating supply from renewable sources through accurate weather forecasting. The solution will be developed by Vestas together with its wholly-owned energy analytics solution provider, Utopus Insights. The solution will improve upon the Australian Wind Energy Forecasting System’s (AWEFS) 5-minute forecast and will be deployed and piloted at Infigen Energy’s Lake Bonney 2 and 3 Wind Farms, two co-located wind farms in South Australia.
The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) is responsible for forecasting electricity generation from wind and solar farms across Australia. Wind and solar farms are penalised for failing to meet required output levels, and conversely can be required to curtail generation to match overly conservative forecasts.
The solution will apply data science techniques including deep learning to high-resolution wind turbine SCADA data, granular short-term hyper-local weather forecasts and meteorological data. The solution will utilise Utopus Insights’ proprietary weather forecasting, coupling physical and statistical models with a 1 km² precision. This is an improvement on traditional global weather forecasts, which operate at coarser temporal resolution and 16 km² spatial resolution.
After the 12-month development and trial phase, Vestas will share its learnings from the pilot with the energy industry, focusing on project challenges, learnings, forecast performance and self-forecast benefits for renewable generators and the broader market.