Characterisation of Large Changes in Wind Power for the Day-Ahead Market Using a Fuzzy Logic Approach

Wind power has become one of the renewable resources with a major growth in the electricity market. However, due to its inherent variability, forecasting techniques are necessary for the optimum scheduling of the electric grid, specially during ramp events. These large changes in wind power may not be captured by wind power point forecasts even with very high resolution numerical weather prediction models. In this paper, a fuzzy approach for wind power ramp characterisation is presented. The main benefit of this technique is that it avoids the binary definition of ramp event, allowing to identify changes in power output that can potentially turn into ramp events when the total percentage of change to be considered a ramp event is not met. To study the application of this technique, wind power forecasts were obtained and their corresponding error estimated using genetic programming and quantile regression forests. The error distributions were incorporated into the characterisation process, which according to the results, improve significantly the ramp capture. Results are presented using colour maps, which provide a useful way to interpret the characteristics of the ramp events.