Multi-site Learning for Forecasting Day-Ahead Wind-Power Production for Onshore Wind Farms in Great Britain with Deep Neural Networks

Overview & Synopsis

Accurate day-ahead wind-power production forecasting is increasingly important for energy system operations, market activity and balancing Great Britain's grid as wind generation grows. In this study, we train multi-site deep neural networks (DNNs) using pooled historical production and reanalysis weather data from 88 onshore wind Balancing Mechanism Units (BMUs). Forecasts are produced at 09:00 UK time for the following midnight-to-midnight delivery day, matching NESO's operational day-ahead forecasting schedule. We use reanalysis weather as future covariates during training and numerical weather prediction (NWP) forecasts during inference, extending training beyond the available historical NWP archive. Our multi-site recurrent neural network outperforms site-specific RNNs and a multi-site XGBoost model, while processing the full future-weather trajectory for the forecast horizon further improves accuracy relative to hour-aligned approaches. Our best model, an RNN with a bidirectional weather encoder (BiRNN) for NWP trajectory processing, reduces MW mean absolute error and root mean squared error relative to NESO by 17.94% and 12.51%, respectively, across 638,246 matched BMU-hour observations under conditions approximating unconstrained wind farm operations. In 40 leave-one-out trials, the BiRNN achieves lower MAE than NESO at 32 excluded sites, indicating transferable forecasting ability despite reduced accuracy when sites are omitted from training. Our capacity-estimation, data-cleaning and reanalysis-based training approach provides a basis for scaling NWP-aware multi-site forecasting to additional wind farms, longer production histories, and increased forecast accuracy beyond that seen in this study.