Prediction of wind speed time series using modified Taylor Kriging method

Wind speed forecasting is critical for the operations of wind turbine and penetration of wind energy into electricity systems. In this paper, a novel time series forecasting method is proposed for this purpose. This method originates from TK (Taylor Kriging) model, but is properly modified for the forecasting of wind speed time series. To investigate the performance of this new method, the wind speed data from an observation site in North Dakota, USA, are adopted. One-year hourly wind speed data are divided into 10 samples, and forecast is made for each sample. In the case study, both the modified TK method and (ARIMA) autoregressive integrated moving average method are employed and their performances are compared. It is found that on average, the proposed method outperforms the ARIMA method by 18.60% and 15.23% in terms of (MAE) mean absolute error and (RMSE) root mean square error. Meanwhile, further theoretical analysis is provided to discuss why the modified TK method is potentially more accurate than the ARIMA method for wind speed time series prediction. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.