Spatio-temporal propagation of wind power prediction errors

The increasing concentration of wind farms in some parts of the world calls for a new descriptive framework of power fluctuation that can summarize spatio-temporal characteristics of the wind power production process. In the mean time, this high number of measurement devices has great potential for informing or alerting about upcoming front or phase errors. In this paper, we shed light on the spatio-temporal characteristics of wind power forecast errors. We justify and use two strategies for obtaining the main direction and the speed of propagation. The first of these relies on an analysis of the local maxima of the correlation structure, and the second builds upon a planar wave modeling. The connection is made with meteorological parameters. Our analysis is presented so as to be easily reproducible in other cases. Copyright (C) 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.