A Behaviour-Aware Federated Forecasting Framework for Distributed Stand-Alone Wind Turbines

Short-term load forecasting (STLF) provides essential information for numerous applications in modern power systems. However, accurate STLF often relies on fine-grained smart-meter data from distributed users, raising increasing concerns about data privacy. Federated learning (FL) has therefore emerged as a promising privacy-preserving paradigm for STLF. Nevertheless, this paper reveals structured heterogeneity in clients' load data. Specifically, clients exhibit different responses to exogenous factors and distinct temporal load profiles, which can degrade forecasting performance in FL. To mitigate these issues, this paper studies the role of model initialization in federated STLF, and proposes two initialization strategies from global and local perspectives. For global model initialization, when auxiliary public load data are available, a pretrained initialization strategy is developed to initialize the global model before federated training, thereby reducing client drift during the training process. For local model initialization, we propose SLIAvg, a sequential local initialization strategy that promotes a more consistent training process by allowing participating clients to start from progressively adapted models within each communication round. Since the proposed strategies only modify the initialization process, they are compatible with most existing FL frameworks and privacy-enhancing techniques. Experiments on real smart-meter data with two representative forecasting architectures demonstrate that the proposed strategies effectively improve forecasting performance, as evidenced by reduced client drift, improved convergence behavior, and lower forecasting errors.

Federated weather modeling on sensor data is a distributed system underpinned by federated learning, enabling multiple sensor data sources, including ground weather stations, satellites and IoT devices, to collaboratively train deep learning models without sharing raw data. This method safeguards data privacy and security while leverages diverse, geographically distributed datasets to improve the accuracy and robustness of global/regional weather modeling tasks such as forecasting and anomaly detection.

Global wind power capacity, especially in China, is booming, with new farms spanning diverse terrains and climates. The industry urgently needs accurate wind power foundation models to shorten commissioning and accelerate grid connection. This is because site-specific time series models (TSMs) are not well suited to data-scarce scenarios and generalize poorly, while generic large time series models (LTSMs) are mostly limited to univariate inputs and cannot fully exploit static site attributes or the dependencies between power and meteorological covariates, leading to insufficient accuracy. To fill this gap, we propose Tyan-WP, the first wind power foundation model for ultra-short-term probabilistic forecasting. Pretrained on a large-scale wind power dataset covering more than 126,000 U.S. sites over seven years, Tyan-WP further improves zero-shot forecasting through two domain-specific module designs: static site embedding using coordinate, terrain, and ecoregion metadata, and a power-aware meteorological fusion (PAMF) module that models interactions between historical power and meteorological covariates. Under a unified evaluation protocol, Tyan-WP surpasses eight site-specific supervised TSMs on 10 in-domain sites and outperforms eleven generic LTSMs on 127 in-domain sites, reducing MAE by 19.9%, RMSE by 16.6%, CRPS by 22.2%, and AQL by 21.7%, while raising R^2 by 16.7%. It further demonstrates strong cross-geography generalization on six real U.K. sites. These results show that the wind power foundation model can achieve accurate zero-shot forecasting without target-site training, providing a practical pathway for rapid turbine onboarding and probabilistic risk management at new wind farms.