Asset bundling for hierarchical forecasting of wind power generation

The growing penetration of intermittent, renewable generation in US power grids, especially wind and solar generation, results in increased operational uncertainty. In that context, accurate forecasts are critical, especially for wind generation, which exhibits large variability and is historically harder to predict. To overcome this challenge, this work proposes a novel Bundle-Predict-Reconcile (BPR) framework that integrates asset bundling, machine learning, and forecast reconciliation techniques. The BPR framework first learns an intermediate hierarchy level (the bundles), then predicts wind power at the asset, bundle, and fleet level, and finally reconciles all forecasts to ensure consistency. This approach effectively introduces an auxiliary learning task (predicting the bundle-level time series) to help the main learning tasks. The paper also introduces new asset-bundling criteria that capture the spatio-temporal dynamics of wind power time series. Extensive numerical experiments are conducted on an industry-size dataset of 283 wind farms in the MISO footprint. The experiments consider short-term and day-ahead forecasts, and evaluates a large variety of forecasting models that include weather predictions as covariates. The results demonstrate the benefits of BPR, which consistently and significantly improves forecast accuracy over baselines, especially at the fleet level.