The Forecasting Procedure for Long-Term Wind Speed in the Zhangye Area

Energy crisis has made it urgent to find alternative energy sources for sustainable energy supply; wind energy is one of the attractive alternatives. Within a wind energy system, the wind speed is one key parameter; accurately forecasting of wind speed can minimize the scheduling errors and in turn increase the reliability of the electric power grid and reduce the power market ancillary service costs. This paper proposes a new hybrid model for long-term wind speed forecasting based on the first definite season index method and the Autoregressive Moving Average (ARMA) models or the Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (GARCH) forecasting models. The forecasting errors are analyzed and compared with the ones obtained from the ARMA, GARCH model, and Support Vector Machine (SVM); the simulation process and results show that the developed method is simple and quite efficient for daily average wind speed forecasting of Hexi Corridor in China. 1. Introduction Energy crisis has made it urgent to find alternative energy sources for sustainable energy supply. Since the first worldwide oil crisis in the early 1970s, energy supply has become tighter and tighter. Many countries have enacted laws to promote renewable energy supply and to reduce the fossil fuel-based energy usage. In the twenty-first century, as the prices of crude oil in the international oil market has gone up like a rocket and the oil resources has been diminishing, renewable energy, such as wind energy and solar power, has attracted more and more attention from both developed and developing countries, especially from the countries that are heavy energy consumers. In recent years, the collective installed capacity of wind power systems increase with an average annual growth rate of 24.8%. There are over 100 thousand wind turbine units have been installed. The installed capacity has reached 94.1 million kilowatts and the revenue of wind power industry has exceeded 37 billion U.S. dollars. With the pressure of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions and mitigating the impact of climate changes, both developed and developing countries have been devoting more and more efforts in renewable energy development. Amongst the affordable renewable energy sources, wind power is considered as one of the most attractive clean energy sources and has becomes the first choice for renewable energy development. The development of wind power industry is one of the China's responses to energy challenges. As China's economic development and industrialization and urbanization are speeding up, energy demand