Accurate wind speed forecasting is a fundamental element of wind power prediction. Thus, a new hybrid wind speed forecasting model, using variational mode decomposition (VMD), the partial autocorrelation function (PACF), and weighted regularized extreme learning machine (WRELM), is proposed to improve the accuracy of wind speed forecasting. First, the historic wind speed time series is decomposed into several intrinsic mode functions (IMFs). Second, the partial correlation of each IMF sequence is analyzed using PACF to select the optimal subfeature set for particular predictors of each IMF. Then, the predictors of each IMF are constructed in order to enhance its strength using WRELM. Finally, wind speed is obtained by adding up all the predictors. The experiment, using real wind speed data, verified the effectiveness and advancement of the new approach.

This paper proposes a new approach to hybrid forecasting methodology, characterized as the statistical recalibration of forecasts from fundamental market price formation models. Such hybrid methods based upon fundamentals are particularly appropriate to medium term forecasting and in this paper the application is to month-ahead, hourly prediction of electricity wholesale prices in Spain. The recalibration methodology is innovative in seeking to perform the recalibration into parametrically defined density functions. The density estimation method selects from a wide diversity of general four-parameter distributions to fit hourly spot prices, in which the first four moments are dynamically estimated as latent functions of the outputs from the fundamental model and several other plausible exogenous drivers. The proposed approach demonstrated its effectiveness against benchmark methods across the full range of percentiles of the price distribution and performed particularly well in the tai... [more]

The power industry is the main battlefield of CO₂ emission reduction, which plays an important role in the implementation and development of the low carbon economy. The forecasting of electricity demand can provide a scientific basis for the country to formulate a power industry development strategy and further promote the sustained, healthy and rapid development of the national economy. Under the goal of low-carbon economy, medium and long term electricity demand forecasting will have very important practical significance. In this paper, a new hybrid electricity demand model framework is characterized as follows: firstly, integration of grey relation degree (GRD) with induced ordered weighted harmonic averaging operator (IOWHA) to propose a new weight determination method of hybrid forecasting model on basis of forecasting accuracy as induced variables is presented; secondly, utilization of the proposed weight determination method to construct the optimal hybrid forecasting model base... [more]

The technological process of exploitation of mineral resources and processing of mined ores to cater to the market results, among other things, in a large amount of tailings deposed on tailing ponds. Because of the chemical composition of the material, the increasing amount of waste, and the mismanagement of recovery and reclamation of ponds, these ponds have become a significant element of negative impact on the surrounding ecosystem. Economics was behind the discharging of this material, resulting in tailing ponds created in inappropriate areas. There is an ongoing process of depositing tailings on old tailing ponds, although no special attention has been paid to the subsequent effect on the environment. Application of intelligent multi-criteria analysis AHP and PROMETHEE has been performed in this paper for the purpose of ranking the degree of negative impact on the environment of tailing ponds. Analysis is performed for five tailing ponds of MMCC (Mining Metallurgy Chemical Combine... [more]

Spikes frequently occur in power quality (PQ) disturbance signals due to various causes such as switching of the inductive loads and the energization of the capacitor bank. Such signals are difficult to analyze using existing time-frequency (TF) methods as these signals have two orthogonal directions in a TF plane. To address this issue, this paper proposes an adaptive TF distribution (TFD) for the analysis of PQ signals. In the proposed adaptive method, the smoothing kernel’s direction is locally adapted based on the direction of energy in the joint TF domain, and hence an improved TF resolution can be obtained. Furthermore, the performance of the proposed adaptive technique in analyzing electrical PQ is thoroughly studied for both synthetic and real world electrical power signals with the help of extensive simulations. The simulation results (specially for empirical data) indicate that the adaptive TFD method achieves high energy concentration in the TF domain for signals composed of... [more]

The electricity market has experienced an increasing level of deregulation and reform over the years. There is an increasing level of electricity price fluctuation, uncertainty, and risk exposure in the marketplace. Traditional risk measurement models based on the homogeneous and efficient market assumption no longer suffice, facing the increasing level of accuracy and reliability requirements. In this paper, we propose a new Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD)-based Value at Risk (VaR) model to estimate the downside risk measure in the electricity market. The proposed model investigates and models the inherent multiscale market risk structure. The EMD model is introduced to decompose the electricity time series into several Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMF) with distinct multiscale characteristics. The Exponential Weighted Moving Average (EWMA) model is used to model the individual risk factors across different scales. Experimental results using different models in the Australian electric... [more]

In order to improve the recognition accuracy and efficiency of power quality disturbances (PQD) in microgrids, a novel PQD feature selection and recognition method based on optimal multi-resolution fast S-transform (OMFST) and classification and regression tree (CART) algorithm is proposed. Firstly, OMFST is carried out according to the frequency domain characteristic of disturbance signal, and 67 features are extracted by time-frequency analysis to construct the original feature set. Subsequently, the optimal feature subset is determined by Gini importance and sorted according to an embedded feature selection method based on the Gini index. Finally, one standard error rule subtree evaluation methods were applied for cost complexity pruning. After pruning, the optimal decision tree (ODT) is obtained for PQD classification. The experiments show that the new method can effectively improve the classification efficiency and accuracy with feature selection step. Simultaneously, the ODT can... [more]

To achieve rapid real-time transient stability prediction, a power system transient stability prediction method based on the extraction of the post-fault trajectory cluster features of generators is proposed. This approach is conducted using data-mining techniques and support vector machine (SVM) models. First, the post-fault rotor angles and generator terminal voltage magnitudes are considered as the input vectors. Second, we construct a high-confidence dataset by extracting the 27 trajectory cluster features obtained from the chosen databases. Then, by applying a filter⁻wrapper algorithm for feature selection, we obtain the final feature set composed of the eight most relevant features for transient stability prediction, called the global trajectory clusters feature subset (GTCFS), which are validated by receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis. Comprehensive simulations are conducted on a New England 39-bus system under various operating conditions, load levels and topologie... [more]

Wind forecasting is critical in the wind power industry, yet forecasting errors often exist. In order to effectively correct the forecasting error, this study develops a weather adapted bias correction scheme on the basis of an average bias-correction method, which considers the deviation of estimated biases associated with the difference in weather type within each unit of the statistical sample. This method is tested by an ensemble forecasting system based on the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model. This system provides high resolution wind speed deterministic forecasts using 40 members generated by initial perturbations and multi-physical schemes. The forecasting system outputs 28⁻52 h predictions with a temporal resolution of 15 min, and is evaluated against collocated anemometer towers observations at six wind fields located on the east coast of China. Results show that the information contained in weather types produces an improvement in the forecast bias correction.

The emergence of wind energy as a potential alternative to traditional sources of fuel has prompted notable research in recent years. One primary factor contributing to efficient utilization of wind energy from a wind farm is the type of turbines used. However, selection of a specific wind turbine type is a difficult task due to several criteria involved in the selection process. Important criteria include turbine’s power rating, height of tower, energy output, rotor diameter, cut-in wind speed, and rated wind speed. The complexity of this selection process is further amplified by the presence of conflicts between the decision criteria. Therefore, a decision is desired that provides the best balance between all selection criteria. Considering the complexities involved in the decision-making process, this paper proposes a two-level decision turbine selection strategy based on fuzzy logic and multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) approach. More specifically, the fuzzy arithmetic mean ope... [more]

Hybridizing chaotic evolutionary algorithms with support vector regression (SVR) to improve forecasting accuracy is a hot topic in electricity load forecasting. Trapping at local optima and premature convergence are critical shortcomings of the tabu search (TS) algorithm. This paper investigates potential improvements of the TS algorithm by applying quantum computing mechanics to enhance the search information sharing mechanism (tabu memory) to improve the forecasting accuracy. This article presents an SVR-based load forecasting model that integrates quantum behaviors and the TS algorithm with the support vector regression model (namely SVRQTS) to obtain a more satisfactory forecasting accuracy. Numerical examples demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms the alternatives.

In this work we propose a new hybrid model, a combination of the manifold learning Principal Components (PC) technique and the traditional multiple regression (PC-regression), for short and medium-term forecasting of daily, aggregated, day-ahead, electricity system-wide load in the Greek Electricity Market for the period 2004⁻2014. PC-regression is shown to effectively capture the intraday, intraweek and annual patterns of load. We compare our model with a number of classical statistical approaches (Holt-Winters exponential smoothing of its generalizations Error-Trend-Seasonal, ETS models, the Seasonal Autoregressive Moving Average with exogenous variables, Seasonal Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average with eXogenous (SARIMAX) model as well as with the more sophisticated artificial intelligence models, Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) and Support Vector Machines (SVM). Using a number of criteria for measuring the quality of the generated in-and out-of-sample forecasts, we have conc... [more]

Big data mining, analysis, and forecasting play vital roles in modern economic and industrial fields, especially in the energy system. Inaccurate forecasting may cause wastes of scarce energy or electricity shortages. However, forecasting in the energy system has proven to be a challenging task due to various unstable factors, such as high fluctuations, autocorrelation and stochastic volatility. To forecast time series data by using hybrid models is a feasible alternative of conventional single forecasting modelling approaches. This paper develops a group of hybrid models to solve the problems above by eliminating the noise in the original data sequence and optimizing the parameters in a back propagation neural network. One of contributions of this paper is to integrate the existing algorithms and models, which jointly show advances over the present state of the art. The results of comparative studies demonstrate that the hybrid models proposed not only satisfactorily approximate the a... [more]

In day-ahead electricity price forecasting (EPF) variable selection is a crucial issue. Conducting an empirical study involving state-of-the-art parsimonious expert models as benchmarks, datasets from three major power markets and five classes of automated selection and shrinkage procedures (single-step elimination, stepwise regression, ridge regression, lasso and elastic nets), we show that using the latter two classes can bring significant accuracy gains compared to commonly-used EPF models. In particular, one of the elastic nets, a class that has not been considered in EPF before, stands out as the best performing model overall.

The day-ahead electricity market is closely related to other commodity markets such as the fuel and emission markets and is increasingly playing a significant role in human life. Thus, in the electricity markets, accurate electricity price forecasting plays significant role for power producers and consumers. Although many studies developing and proposing highly accurate forecasting models exist in the literature, there have been few investigations on improving the forecasting effectiveness of electricity price from the perspective of reducing the volatility of data with satisfactory accuracy. Based on reducing the volatility of the electricity price and the forecasting nature of the radial basis function network (RBFN), this paper successfully develops a two-stage model to forecast the day-ahead electricity price, of which the first stage is particle swarm optimization (PSO)-core mapping (CM) with self-organizing-map and fuzzy set (PCMwSF), and the second stage is selection rule (SR).... [more]

Carbon emissions are the major cause of the global warming; therefore, the exploration of carbon emissions reduction potential is of great significance to reduce carbon emissions. This paper explores the potential of carbon intensity reduction in Beijing in 2020. Based on factors including economic growth, resident population growth, energy structure adjustment, industrial structure adjustment and technical progress, the paper sets 48 development scenarios during the years 2015⁻2020. Then, the back propagation (BP) neural network optimized by improved particle swarm optimization algorithm (IPSO) is used to calculate the carbon emissions and carbon intensity reduction potential under various scenarios for 2016 and 2020. Finally, the contribution of different factors to carbon intensity reduction is compared. The results indicate that Beijing could more than fulfill the 40%⁻45% reduction target for carbon intensity in 2020 in all of the scenarios. Furthermore, energy structure adjustment... [more]

Classification problems and their corresponding solving approaches constitute one of the fields of machine learning. The application of classification schemes in Renewable Energy (RE) has gained significant attention in the last few years, contributing to the deployment, management and optimization of RE systems. The main objective of this paper is to review the most important classification algorithms applied to RE problems, including both classical and novel algorithms. The paper also provides a comprehensive literature review and discussion on different classification techniques in specific RE problems, including wind speed/power prediction, fault diagnosis in RE systems, power quality disturbance classification and other applications in alternative RE systems. In this way, the paper describes classification techniques and metrics applied to RE problems, thus being useful both for researchers dealing with this kind of problem and for practitioners of the field.

In the context of the liberalization of electricity markets, forecasting prices is essential. With this aim, research has evolved to model the particularities of electricity prices. In particular, dynamic factor models have been quite successful in the task, both in the short and long run. However, specifying a single model for the unobserved factors is difficult, and it cannot be guaranteed that such a model exists. In this paper, model averaging is employed to overcome this difficulty, with the expectation that electricity prices would be better forecast by a combination of models for the factors than by a single model. Although our procedure is applicable in other markets, it is illustrated with an application to forecasting spot prices of the Iberian Market, MIBEL (The Iberian Electricity Market). Three combinations of forecasts are successful in providing improved results for alternative forecasting horizons.

Accurate wind power generation prediction, which has positive implications for making full use of wind energy, seems still a critical issue and a huge challenge. In this paper, a novel hybrid approach has been proposed for wind power generation forecasting in the light of Cloud-Based Evolutionary Algorithm (CBEA) and Least Squares Support Vector Machine (LSSVM). In order to improve the forecasting precision, a two-way comparison approach is conducted to preprocess the original wind power generation data. The pertinent parameters of LSSVM are optimized by using CBEA to verify the learning and generalization abilities of the LSSVM model. The experimental results indicate that the forecasting performance of the proposed model is better than the single LSSVM model and all of the other models for comparison. Moreover, the paired-sample t-test is employed to cast light on the applicability of the developed model.

In order to investigate how artificial neural networks (ANNs) have been applied for partial discharge (PD) pattern recognition, this paper reviews recent progress made on ANN development for PD classification by a literature survey. Contributions from several authors have been presented and discussed. High recognition rate has been recorded for several PD faults, but there are still many factors that hinder correct recognition of PD by the ANN, such as high-amplitude noise or wide spectral content typical from industrial environments, trial and error approaches in determining an optimum ANN, multiple PD sources acting simultaneously, lack of comprehensive and up to date databank of PD faults, and the appropriate selection of the characteristics that allow a correct recognition of the type of source which are currently being addressed by researchers. Several suggestions for improvement are proposed by the authors include: (1) determining the optimum weights in training the ANN; (2) usin... [more]

This paper presents the development of a WebGIS application aimed at providing safe and reliable data needed for reclamation of abandoned mines in national parks and other protected areas in Vojvodina in compliance with existing legal regulations. The geodatabase model for this application has been developed using UML and the CASE tool Microsoft Visio featuring an interface with ArcGIS. The WebGIS application was developed using GeoServer, an open source tool in the Java programming language, with integrated PostgreSQL DB and the possibility of generating and publishing WMS, WFS and KML services. The WebGIS application is publicly available, based on an appropriate central database, which for the first time encompasses all available data on abandoned mines in Vojvodina, and as such may serve as a model for similar databases on the territory of the Republic of Serbia.

Battery grouping is a technology widely used to improve the performance of battery packs. In this paper, we propose a time series clustering based battery grouping method. The proposed method utilizes the whole battery charge/discharge sequence for battery grouping. The time sequences are first denoised with a wavelet denoising technique. The similarity matrix is then computed with the dynamic time warping distance, and finally the time series are clustered with the affinity propagation algorithm according to the calculated similarity matrices. The silhouette index is utilized for assessing the performance of the proposed battery grouping method. Test results show that the proposed battery grouping method is effective.

A permanent magnet (PM) synchronous generator system driven by wind turbine (WT), connected with smart grid via AC-DC converter and DC-AC converter, are controlled by the novel recurrent Chebyshev neural network (NN) and amended particle swarm optimization (PSO) to regulate output power and output voltage in two power converters in this study. Because a PM synchronous generator system driven by WT is an unknown non-linear and time-varying dynamic system, the on-line training novel recurrent Chebyshev NN control system is developed to regulate DC voltage of the AC-DC converter and AC voltage of the DC-AC converter connected with smart grid. Furthermore, the variable learning rate of the novel recurrent Chebyshev NN is regulated according to discrete-type Lyapunov function for improving the control performance and enhancing convergent speed. Finally, some experimental results are shown to verify the effectiveness of the proposed control method for a WT driving a PM synchronous generator... [more]

In existing forecasting research papers support vector regression with chaotic mapping function and evolutionary algorithms have shown their advantages in terms of forecasting accuracy improvement. However, for classical particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithms, trapping in local optima results in an earlier standstill of the particles and lost activities, thus, its core drawback is that eventually it produces low forecasting accuracy. To continue exploring possible improvements of the PSO algorithm, such as expanding the search space, this paper applies quantum mechanics to empower each particle to possess quantum behavior, to enlarge its search space, then, to improve the forecasting accuracy. This investigation presents a support vector regression (SVR)-based load forecasting model which hybridizes the chaotic mapping function and quantum particle swarm optimization algorithm with a support vector regression model, namely the SVRCQPSO (support vector regression with chaotic quan... [more]

Remaining useful life (RUL) estimation is considered as one of the most central points in the prognostics and health management (PHM). The present paper describes a nonlinear hybrid ABC⁻MARS-based model for the prediction of the remaining useful life of aircraft engines. Indeed, it is well-known that an accurate RUL estimation allows failure prevention in a more controllable way so that the effective maintenance can be carried out in appropriate time to correct impending faults. The proposed hybrid model combines multivariate adaptive regression splines (MARS), which have been successfully adopted for regression problems, with the artificial bee colony (ABC) technique. This optimization technique involves parameter setting in the MARS training procedure, which significantly influences the regression accuracy. However, its use in reliability applications has not yet been widely explored. Bearing this in mind, remaining useful life values have been predicted here by using the hybrid ABC⁻... [more]